Age of the Uzi: The China Sea
by Rokhal
Summary: Post-post-post AWE: In 1971, Jack Sparrow and his intrepid crew break open a Chinese prison and rescue a rather frightening old Elizabeth Swann. Drama! Flying boats! Gun-fights and intrigue in the Far East! W/E manipulation, J/E emotional abuse.
1. Oh, Canada

Disclaimer: Disclaimed!

This is the sequel to Big Wings, but it ought to stand on its own, anyway. 

Just before our story begins, Jack Sparrow stole back _Tonga Mars_, the giant flying boat that pillaged the East Indies in the 1960's and 70's, with the help of a greedy med-school applicant named Kyle.

As in all the Age of the Uzi stories, they found the Fountain of Youth, which, disappointingly, doesn't make people immortal.

* * *

**Oh, Canada**

_Where Royal Mounties can arrest me._

* * *

_The present day. Vancouver. _

Jack Sparrow had a ship. He did not have a crew.

Oh, he had _one crewman_, the lanky young sawbones Kyle Warner, and his ship was actually more of an airplane, what with its two wings, its four radial engines, and its helpful habit of leaping thousands of miles over hills and forests through the open sky, but _Tonga Mars_ was wet enough to be a ship, and he'd sooner take Barbossa's cursed monkey to Malacca than Kyle Warner. The boy was trouble.

That morning they had left the great black ship sleeping on a secluded lake in the Canadian woods, shivered on the side of the road before thumbing a ride from a young man in an orange pickup, and were currently cruising down quiet back-roads lined with dripping pines, toward Vancouver, in search of certain tavern. The tavern belonged to an old acquaintance, who ought to have rounded up a dozen sane or docile criminals eager to leave North America for a life of travel, debauchery, and excess usually reserved for rock stars.

When Sparrow spotted the bar, he told the pimply driver to stop, got out of the little cab, and hauled a shivering Kyle to his feet and out of the open truck bed.

"After you," said Jack cheerily, waving toward the door and the shimmering blue mosquito lamp. Kyle, wiping his nose dry on his sleeve, hunched and clasped his numbed hands under his armpits. He felt extremely uneasy about turning his back to a man he had recently strangled with a drawstring, but he supposed that was the point. Looking over the building before him, he cringed.

If there was a god of apathy, his favorite temple would be a backwoods tavern called Jules' Hole. The dark brown paint peeled away from silvery wood panels, the steep steel roof wore streaks of rust like gravy stains, the neon Budweiser sign in the window was half dead, the TV had passed its fifteenth birthday after four years of grainy hockey games and snow-washed news. Unkempt shrubs screened the back lot from the road. Jules' Hole was the only place an outlaw biker and two rival triad men could sit at the same table and watch the game over a brace of warm beers—the lowlifes who drank there simply did not care who shared the bar, so long as they kept to themselves.

The enforcement for the torpor that shrouded the Hole was partly its repellant shabbiness, and partly Jules' obsessive, almost preternatural vigilance against anyone who cared enough to make trouble.

Jules was a somber, slouching man, rail-thin but for a small pot-belly, bald but for a little gray tonsure around the back of his head. One foot always dragged as he stumped around behind the bar. When a newcomer walked in, Jules would squint at them as though he needed glasses but had never bothered with an optometrist, then, on some mysterious judgment, either ask their preference or show them right back out the door. The shotgun behind the counter was not for show.

The regulars liked Jules. He kept things quiet and minded his own business. He had been a crook like them, in another life, and he was always good for a story, given a little prodding. When Jules reminisced about his wild youth, he was different than other washed-up old men: he had a hunger about him, a mad hope that filtered through. 

If Kyle and Sparrow had arrived a week and two hours earlier, they would have heard Jules casually telling a knot of newcomers how he had hurt his leg.

"So Jim said, where we gonna get a helicopter in Zhanjiang?" Jules spoke quietly, soft enough to hear the game over, as he leaned on the bar and wiped glasses with a yellowish rag.

"And then Mitty said,_ Mat Russia_ this and that, we could fly _Tonga_ up to Vladivostok and grab a helicopter. And Gung Ngau said sure, we could grab one, but could we fly it? And then we all looked at the captain, could _he_ fly it, and he kind of shrugged us off like he usually did and said something about dogs and a piece of meat and a lifeboat, can't really remember, except that he meant if we landed the chopper near the prison, all the Chinese ladies would try to pile on and hang by the skids or something, and we'd never get back off the ground.

"Now he was in a bit of a mood, since we'd practically striked him into helping us once we heard about the arrest, but we couldn't just leave Hiu's grandma locked up in the _Laogai_. She'd make the whole crew dumplings whenever we docked in town, see, and Hiu was a sweet kid."

* * *

_1971, T minus sixteen days. A teahouse near Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province, People's Republic of China.  
_

Madam Zham had gotten herself pinched. Nabbed. Delivered an undeclinable invitation to the reeducation camp. Locked up. The Reds didn't appreciate her flexible view of the law and her unstable political leanings.

This was unfortunate for the crew of the _Tonga_ because the feisty widow was called "Madam" for a reason, and it wasn't a very polite one. She might not have run a cathouse herself, but she always knew where the boys could have a good time: the government frowned on it, but like many things in China, it was there for those who knew who to ask. She dealt in banned books under the table—always a risky, but lucrative business in a dictatorship—so the crew could get a bit for their old science fiction novels, poetry books, and nude magazines. Her son, a "procurement officer," or village fence, would usually come up with a bundle of _yuan _or a month's provisions for any bolts, screws, coffee, cigarettes, or whatever else the _Tonga _had happened to plunder. And her spring dumplings were heavenly.

Her arrest was unfortunate for Jack Sparrow because his crew was unhappy, doubly unfortunate because they were convinced that they, meaning Jack, could do something to put things right: the price of his unearthly cunning and magnificent leadership skill.

Jack had found himself with a quandary. If any ship could ever become half the shadow of what the _Black Pearl_ had been, it was _Tonga Mars._ He wasn't ready to abandon the plane just yet, and certainly didn't want to compete with her as an enemy in the future, so he had bowed to the crew's demands, and now found himself in a scruffy teahouse filled with policemen.

He regretted handling reconnaissance himself.

It had been a few years—more than a few, perhaps a decade—since he had last ventured any further into New China than Hiu's tiny, isolated village set on brackish ground and largely ignored by government collectors. This teahouse was in the city, filled with weary respectable town fathers and flat-faced police—they were all flat-faced, he noticed, wearing a rigid half-smile that concealed and stifled like a mask, and they were all uniformed: the police in rumpled green short-collared jackets with belts, and the businessmen in head-to-toe black to imitate the dress of Party-members. It was as though he had wandered onto a parade ground, not a watering hole.

Twenty pairs of eyebrows lifted in cautious surprise as the door swung closed behind him, and the four nearest policemen got to their feet.

Jack bowed his little bow and backed right out the way he came.

He heard footsteps as he dodged into the teahouse's alley. It was barely wide enough for a dog to get through, much less a pirate, but Jack squeezed, glancing to the side and seeing a green-shirted policeman staring at him and hollering. He scraped his face against the wood to look the other way, still hop-shuffling sideways, and saw another policeman slide into place. He was bottled in—it was about as roomy as an actual bottle, come to think of it.

Never to be discouraged, and cursing freely, Jack pinned his elbows into the gap, hitched his knees off the ground to plant his feet on the wall, and began to wriggle upward.

The policemen were squeezing their own way into the alley. Jack wriggled faster, worming toward the eaves overhead, until he felt a tug on his boot. He heaved himself up another six inches and kicked, smashing the policeman's hand against the wall, until the other policeman grabbed his other boot, and Jack found himself dangling painfully by his shoulders and elbows. Looking down, he kicked the man on the left in the nose, freed that leg, and grunted and scrambled up, hitching himself sideways to pull his feet out of their reach.

The man on the right still clung to him like a squat, olive-green remora, and the man with the broken nose staggered up and joined him in hauling Jack down by his boot. Jack twisted out of it, leaving the men to drop against the wall with a reeking slab of leather that had molded perfectly to his foot over its five-year career and the clutter of coins, bits of fishing line, emergency knives, and matches that he stored down there. "You better bloody appreciate that," he snapped in gutter-Cantonese as they chattered back at him. They talked too fast—something about a ladder. Jack reached the top of the roof in front of him, flopped onto it, and seal-crawled his way onto the shingles.

And then he was off, sprinting over ridgelines, leaping alleys wide enough for horsecarts and streets too narrow for pigs, hobbling on one boot with his arms flailing around his head as though clutching for invisible ratlines, losing elevation with every third jump, and constantly scanning for dead ends.

The police were good. There was a baying pack of them running along the ground, and the civilians joined in the chase.

It was as though the whole city had something to prove.

Now that he was up on the roofs, Jack realized as he hit a gable, jumped, bashed his knee on the landing, and rolled to his feet, he was far safer than he would be if he tried to slip down unseen before the crowd caught him. He hopped another gap, a narrow one the length of his arm, and for a blessed ten seconds crossed the roof with the noise falling away behind him, before a shout from below brought the rabble back to his heels. What he needed was a barrier, a wall, a pack of hyenas, a gas explosion, something to put a damper on the citizens while he made his stunning, improbable, and above all, successful escape. He'd settle for hiding in a diaper truck, frankly.

Modernization had patched the classic peaked-roofed buildings with mushrooms of flat-topped concrete, and the first chance he got, Jack hopped onto a line of those new buildings that led towards the river, noticing as he ran that his human hounds now had an advance guard of four-legged hounds, who whined and yapped, heads to the sky, at his every footfall. Smiling like a broad highway or the tracks of trade winds, grubby new concrete box-tenements pointed the way to the river—the river, yes! the little smelly greasy fouled canal of a river, with a lonely power line stretched across for the doves to perch, a power line that seemed to disappear right at the corner of a building near the river's edge, and hang on the other side from higher rooftop.

Only a few more roofs to go. Would he shimmy across, or swing? To swing, he'd have to cut the wires, and slicing cable with a sword without electrocuting himself would be awkward if he could manage at all, so perhaps he would shimmy.

If only they weren't all _watching_ as he inched himself upside down along the wire, Jack thought, glancing down at the knot of people bunched together directly beneath him. But thankfully, they hadn't resorted to guns yet…

Probably because he hadn't done anything wrong.

Down at the fringe of the crowd, a boy and his dog watched a strange man crawl upside-down on a power line, toward the river's edge. The dog barked helplessly, and the boy found himself a fist-sized rock, took aim, and clocked the fugitive on the head, dropping him like an overripe plum, square in the center of the crowd.

* * *

Welcome to Communism. I turn every Communist country into the Evil Empire in this story; what can I say, I fear big government.

Sorry to any Communists. And I do mean "sorry."�


	2. Sche Ne Vmerla Ukrainy

**Shche Ne Vmerla Ukrainy**

_I pokazhem, shcho my, brattia, kozats'koho rodu._

Jack regained his senses during a face-cleaning administered by two or three muddy, mangy dogs, and the first thing he thought of was how it was nothing at all like being wildly kissed by beautiful women, and the second thing was that their tongues smelled like a dozen different substances that he didn't want on his face. He sat up and swiped around his head until the dogs wandered off, affronted.

Someone hauled him to his feet by his hair, and Jack leaned his head hard against the hand that held him while the world bucked and spun. He was surrounded by about seventy giants and midgets, all lined up tallest to shortest—no, that wasn't reasonable. The sun made him nauseous. He made some muddled calculations and concluded that there were about twenty averaged-sized people, and he was seeing triple.

"Parlay!" he exclaimed brightly, gripping the man that held him by the back of the neck and noticing that whoever it was was knotted as a plowhorse. The crowd seemed unimpressed. "No me killim. Toktok? Mipila stretpela, gut, i no stret, hoki? Dood mi niet. Hablemos premero. Mif logorim, nactoko oropcheno. _Sorry._ Savvy?"

The burly policeman holding him turned to a friend who had joined the crowd in staring at Jack as though he were some sort of five-legged donkey. "What the hell kind of language is that?"

_Cantonese_, thought Jack, still working his Ingratiating smile. What did he know in Cantonese? He could haggle, he could wish the Emperor health, he could make off-color jokes about a hundred subjects including the Emperor, he could critique an enemy's swordplay—right now, though, he felt reduced to throwing out random syllables until something made sense. "Suixi Women's Reformation through Labor," he blurted, then grinned as he realized that not only had he said it in the right language, he had said something useful.

"Suixi Laogai," said the plowhorse. "I know that place, I worked there."

"What is your country, foreigner," barked a sour-faced police captain.

Jack rocked back away from him and drew himself up as tall as he could with another man pulling down on his hair. He decided to go with the last wrong language he'd spoken. "I from Russia," he said, bruising his Cantonese with a bizarre accent.

The captain's face lifted a bit; evidently Russians were good people to be courteous to. "You mean the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," he said, with a hint of curiosity in his voice.

"Da, da. That. Comrade, where are your two fine men who gave chase me? They have my boot," he said, and wriggled his toes. "Zhanzhiang should be proud of them, they flew at me like mighty borzoi. Had only the devout and compulsive police of Vournikovikovska such training, such passion like the mad dog. This is lesson I take back to my country." Someone passed his boot through the crowd, and Jack handed the man who gave it to him a ruble from his coat pocket. The man spit on the coin, polished it on a sleeve, and, grinning, tucked it away.

"Pardon me, good Russian," said the captain, "but I have never seen a Russian to look like you. In what province is . . . Worn-koy-koy-chan?"

"Province!" Jack sneered, and spat on the ground. "I am Cossack," he declared, drawing his coat back to reveal the saber at his hip. The crowd shrank back slightly, which gave him a warm feeling. "Cossack knows no province, as no one keeps a Cossack! Cossacks have freedom of wide steppe, the wind on hair, and company and plunder of other Cossacks. And also company of feisty, _wise_ women," he said, twisting the word "wise" into something the police captain licked his lips over. "Cossacks also have lousy jails and policemen who know less than their horses—which is a credit, truly, being our horses are very smart. So I, Jascha Capitanovic, come to your country from my country to gather the magnificent skill of police and prison who put pretty Zhanzhiang in so iron trample-hoof fist of legal order, so to go to my country so teach iron police horse men all of comrade China's legal order and strike back evil dirty criminals." He spat again. "Perhaps start with Suixi Laogai? Cossacks have much to learn of women's prisons; our women are wise, but very feisty."

"You—you care to tour Suixi Laogai?" asked the captain, frowning in bewilderment.

Jack startled, amazed at his good luck. "Da!"

"Let me see your travel papers, good Russian—Cossack—and Hou will get a car."

Jack reached into his other boot and handed the captain the warranty agreement for a Waring blender.

"I cannot read this," said the captain, inspecting it closely.

Jack plucked the warranty from his hands and handed it back again, upside-down.

"Oh," said the captain, red-faced. He thrust the paper back. "Hou!" he shouted, as someone unseen began to snigger. "Get the car!"

* * *

"—And then my comrades and I on our war-boats sailed twenty leagues that evening under a busy wind, pillaged the whole isle, and returned by morning with twelve more boats and more pots and tin cans given them by the filthy Americans during the war than a Taiwanese could hock in an alley," said Jack, finishing the highlights of the last years he'd spent as the god-king of a previously unknown Pacific island. The trick was getting a bit old, but giving the islanders distilled spirits and cookware, as they gave him—or rather, his floatplane that he had arrived on—worship and offerings, had helped him through a dark time in his life. That little plane was always smothered in flower garlands, shell necklaces, warpaint, and strange whisk-like objects made from dried banana leaves.

"I did not know Cossacks could fly planes," said the plowhorse, behind him.

"No one keeps a Cossack!" Jack barked. "I fly where my horse cannot carry."

Jascha Capitanovic, as an honored guest, had the front passenger seat of the rattley little car, while the captain drove and two policemen sat in back. Once it appeared Jack had finished his story, an uncomfortable silence fell, and Jack watched out the window for landmarks. The hill country was lush, green, full of foamy floaty budding branches and soft meadows, lit by a mellow sky the color of sea fog. The sight of hills, unfortunately, made him dizzy in the pit of his stomach; it was unnatural to stand at the foot of something so tall; the surface of the earth should not be jagged. Mountains were hairy brown moles on the otherwise smooth forehead of the world.

"You know, you are the second foreigner to visit Suixi Laogai," said the captain, by way of conversation.

The other policeman, who was a bit pudgier than Plowhorse, snorted. "He will be the first foreigner to leave it, then."

"Second," said Plowhorse.

"What?" Pudgy was skeptical.

"_First,_" snapped the captain firmly.

"What is this, comrades?" Jack asked, turning around in his seat as he offered the captain a sip from his flask.

"Nothing, nothing, just a silly story among the guards," said the captain. "Ignore it."

"Nonsense, good comrade!" said Jack, indicating for the captain to keep the flask. "I did all my talking; tell this silly story, da?"

Plowhorse watched the captain nervously, torn between the urge to gossip to the visitor and Pudgy, and the fear of official reproof. The captain took a deep swig with his right hand, steered with his left, and ignored a stop sign, so Plowhorse shrugged to himself and obliged. "It was before my time, just after the Hundred Flowers campaign. There had been many arrests, and Suixi Laogai had a new prisoner, a Christian missionary woman from America."

"Britain," the captain corrected.

"Britain. Now it happened, when this missionary had been reeducated in the great reforms of Beloved Chairman Mao for four months, she was removed from the facility five days, and was brought back. For a hearing, they say. That was the same time they executed that _wokou_ war criminal Zhu Hong—remember Zhu Hong, Hou? She fell in with the Kuomintang, so they say—bad choice of friends. Imagine, she scoffed at our Revolution!"

Jack flinched at the name, and stared rigidly out the window.

* * *

The opening lines are from the national anthem of the Ukraine--home to the bold and dashing Cossack horsemen. The languages Jack apologizes and pleads for his life in are, in order, Papua New Guinea pidgin, Dutch, Spanish, and Russian. 

Suixi is a real town, but I don't know if it has a Laogai, or reformation-through-labor facility--that is, prison.

The Hundred Flowers Campaign was a purge of dissenters from against the Chinese Communist Party under Chairman Mao.

And yes: during and after World War II, Jack had himself a cargo cult. It's a bit over-used, but I couldn't restrain myself.


	3. Fight For Your Right

**Fight For Your Right**

_To Parrrrrrrty!  
_

_1944, adjunct base of the Quiongya Independent Guerrilla Column, Wan Ning bay, Hainan Island, off the coast of Guangdong, China._

Private Morrison was in Eden.

A bomb-gouged, burnt, and harried Eden, filled with stone-faced widowed Eves and their tottering brats, buffalo wandering over downed fences from field to charred field, wooded retreats and stony dugouts everywhere, lookouts tense and huddled at the tops of hills, but Hainan herself was a jewel-isle, ringed by living blue, laced with soft warm beaches and roaring volcanic cliff-shore, her bony green hills dressed with trees and slashed with meadows in that smiling, ancient elegance found only in Old World land; Brandon Morrison thought of his brief stop in Hawaii on his way to the Japanese Theatre, and was never more glad to have continued across the Pacific.

The huts and tents of the Resistance smoked slightly with cook-fires and rang with chatter that Morrison still could make no sense of. On standards flapped wide ribbon-banners bearing stacks of mysterious red symbols; cooking spoons clicked on hot wide pans of chopped vegetables; whole fish roasted on skewers; here and there, a colorful paper globe had been hung up. A file of young women in sky-blue uniforms, faces shaded by billed caps and shins wrapped in cloth strips like the men, stalked past, and Morrison nodded and tipped his hat to them; eyes flicked to him, then flicked back, away from the foreigner. The poor girls had likely seen more action than he had._The lengths invasion drives people to._

He shrugged against the straps of his pack, where his radio and cipher-books rested after their long trip up and down the mountain, and struck off over the well-trampled weeds toward the shoreward hill, where a lonely American flag crested a little green ridge tent, and Dale Coulter squatted by the small fire, stirring something steaming in an upside-down helmet. "Season's greetings from Central?" Coulter asked, eyes never leaving the soup as Morrison's boots slurped against the grass.

Morrison flopped to the ground and reclined against his bulky pack, letting the damp of the ground ooze up his trousers. He gestured at the guerrilla camp. "What's the to-do, Dale? They've got the party lights out and they're cooking and everything."

Coulter snorted and scratched his brown stubble. "You kept your eyes open up on that mountain, you mighta seen it come in. Wha'd'you do, read the manual again? The _on_ switch is that little metal stick on the side of the heavy green lunchbox. You talk into the telly-phone, like at the post office."

"Seen what?" murmured Morrison, staring up at the perfect aquamarine twilight.

Coulter eyed him, bemused, and shook his head. "It's in the bay. Pulled in around noon."

Morrison wriggled further down against his pack and shut his eyes. "Just tell me what it is, the suspense is killing me."

"On yer feet, Marine," grunted Coulter, giving his friend a hearty swat over the head. Morrison groaned, heaved himself up, and left his pack on the ground, and the two of them hiked up the ridge that hid them from the bay, Coulter giving Morrison a finger-jab in the ribs whenever he failed to keep pace. At the crest of the little ridge, they looked down on a spectacularly narrow, sheltered inlet, dotted with fishing junks whose sails always reminded Morrison of bat wings, spiked with rock pillars along a strip of shore that divided the bay from the sea.

Morrison glanced from boat to boat with hooded eyes, and then, as he looked near the mouth, he stopped and blinked. He squinted, wishing he'd brought his binoculars. "Looks like a Jap escort boat. What's it doing here?"

A hundred-foot steel gunboat sat at anchor, with a dark flag hanging slack from its radio mast. A few men were moving about on its decks, lugging boxes between them, and others were clustered at the rail, waving and shouting to a flock of small boats the villagers had rowed out.

"Dunno who they are, but everyone's real happy to see 'em," said Coulter. "So, not Japs."

Morrison rolled his eyes. The battleship lowered one of its many launches bearing a crate and a handful of men, who began to row it lackadaisically ashore. "Looks like we'll meet them."

"The Chinese are cooking extra. Should be a party."

* * *

So it was that as dusk deepened, a smiling young Chinese man who spoke a little English—Chang or Ching, Morrison was embarrassed to ask which—came to usher the half-dozen American Marines to the center of the camp. Most of the guerrillas seemed to have left their huts to share fish and rice under the rising stars, and the wind stirred up the occasional whiff of alcohol. Guerrillas the Americans could never tell apart smiled and welcomed them, and they smiled back awkwardly and eventually sat themselves down in their own corner, across a low fire from the Women's Detachment, who were a model of professionalism sitting in neat circles, speaking quietly over their bowls and watching the leaders of the Column, who formed a comfortable spread among the great mass of the men's divisions. 

Chang or Ching had mentioned a week ago that a man was coming from Mount Murui, the center of the Chinese Resistance on Hainan, and Morrison fancied he could pick him out: a stern man near the fire, conferring with the commander of the local base.

Directly across from the Resistance men, Morrison saw a very different crowd of Chinese: a few wore arm bands or uniforms like the guerrillas, but those were often half-replaced with rags, hide, and loud, flowing silks, and even what appeared to be scraps of Japan's Rising Sun flag tied here and there and scrawled over with what must have been very rude letters. They jostled each-other and joked, laughing loud and coarse, and carving strips off a whole lamb that roasted on a separate cookfire in the midst of them with long, curved, worn, and glinting daggers. The crates from the boat were stacked in their camp, proud at the inside edge.

The stern man from Mount Murui and the local commander stepped to the fire and gave a speech to the newcomers on one side and to the guerrillas on the other, and at the end of it they gestured toward their own side of the camp, where a line of men approached, laden with sacks of rice and soybeans. The bearers trudged past the fire to set their burdens at the newcomers' side, where men licked their chops and stared anxiously into the dark.

A few salted hams and whole piglets followed the grain, and after that, the strange men leapt to their feet and cheered as the trail of the procession arrived, lugging barrels and urns of beer and weak, syrupy pot-rum. A mass of them charged over to help the guerrillas with their burdens, then a milling crowd condensed around the alcohol, men pulling canteens and mugs out of their coats, shoving into the center of the mass, and then blundering out again, drinking and sloshing. A few capered over to the guerrillas' ranks, grabbing them by the shoulders and shoving alcohol in their faces, grinning.

"Whoa, look at the _dish!_" Coulter hissed in Morrison's ear. High above the shoving crowd, feet planted on the stack of crates from the patrol boat, stood a woman in black and green: wide trousers, knee-length overcoat, gun-belts, bandoliers, boots, brocade cap, and a swinging braid of honey-gold hair. The Americans stared. It had been months since they'd last seen a white woman, and while the Chinese girls were pretty enough, their brand of beauty was nothing like the lovelies who lounged on playing cards and the noses of fighter planes, and didn't quite make sense to the men. Though her face was more familiar, this woman was nothing like the girls at home, either, with her harsh lean jaw and creased, obsidian eyes, and as though to prove it, she swung a BAR rifle up onto her shoulder and sent a sparking staccato blast into the sky.

The revelers at her feet paused and turned their eyes to her.

She snapped at them in Chinese. Then she waved at the guerrilla camp, seemed to address the man from Mount Murui, and turned back to her own rabble, scolding them with her fists on her hips. Then she said something else, short, and the whole assembly leaned back and laughed. She leapt off the crates, and a knot of men crowded around and hoisted them onto their shoulders like pal-bearers, to cross the camp center and drop them with booms and clangs to the ground. The woman, taller than many of the men, crossed the space in a few steps and bowed lightly to the leaders, and watched as the bearers ripped off the crates' lids and flung them to the dirt. Behind the shifting backs of the men, Morrison could just make out a glitter of steel, until two of them hoisted over their heads a yard-long Japanese machine gun. The guerrillas cheered.

With a regal smile, she offered her canteen to the commanders, who took a little alcohol in tin mugs, then, like a college boy, she linked arms and knocked back a swallow with the two men in turn. She turned to face her own men and announced something that made them cheer and the guerrilla leaders frown, then she turned to the guerrillas, raised her fist, and shouted to the sky, a cry that the entire camp took up, echoing, blurring, roaring: the leaders, the divisions, the newcomers, the women's detachment. Even the marines joined in the yelling.

The woman bowed to the leaders again and strode back to her side of the camp, passing so close to the marines that they could see the scattered lines in her face, the burn on her left hand, the embroidery and mended tears on her overcoat. Morrison waved to her, hesitantly, his arm stopping at shoulder height, and she paused in her step and looked at him. His mouth dropped. "M-merry Christmas," he stammered, for lack of anything else to say, and her mouth twitched as though to smile before she went on and disappeared again in the festivities.

No air raids disturbed them that night, while the fighters drank and danced long through the dark. The marines snuck back to their tent long before the fires were doused. They fiddled with the radio, caught little more than a hissing Japanese broadcast, and talked of their girls who waited at home, their mothers' cooking, their dogs. When they finally slept, distant firelight still glowed on the wall of their tent.

* * *

There was indeed a strong guerrilla force on Hainan Island called the Quiongya Independent Guerrilla Column,which received relatively little help from the Communist Party on the mainland, and had a lot of operational freedom. Hainan had the misfortune to host Japanese invaders, Communist Guerrillas, and Kuomintang--Chinese nationalist--troops, all of whom were trying to kill each-other. It lost most of its male population in the course of the war. 

After the war, the Communist Party made its move against the Kuomintang, driving the Nationalists to Taiwan.


	4. Free Ride

**Free Ride  
**

_Lead you into the Promised Land.  
_

In the morning, Morrison, Coulter, Ned Trilby, Joshua Stone, Donald Halliday, and Warren Resnick hunched over their very small, dry fire, cooking rice and trying to make it into porridge, when a short, wiry, nut-brown man wearing a sort of embroidered cloth crown on his head, Japanese naval-issue trousers, and a colorful sash of the same make as his head-band over his bare chest marched up to them, shoved his way to the fire, and scooped out a good glob of hot rice from the cooking helmet with his machete.

The marines stared uncertainly at him as he blew on the rice and licked it off. He scowled at them. "Pansy whoresons," he scoffed, in a heavy accent, and jerked his thumb toward the bay over the ridge. "Zhu Hong want you meeting. Chop-chop, move your scurvy hides, all o' yer."

"Zhu Hong?" Morrison asked.

"Be happy," said the little man. "On boat, meet lady, get beer and ham."

"I'll go for some ham," said Coulter, and they left the rice cooking and headed for the ship.

As they rowed out, a breeze nosed its way into the harbor and peeled the strange ship's flag away from its pole: all black, with a white hammer crossed by a sword. The ship's name was in Japanese or Chinese or Korean or something; Morrison had no idea.

Their guide hooked the little rowboat to the bottom of a ladder, and the six marines stared nervously up at the top. "Nose goes," said Coulter abruptly. Everyone who heard him slapped a finger over the tip of his nose, and Morrison, who had still been staring at the big slashing letters on the bow, found himself leading the party up the ladder by default.

He was greeted by a wall of brown men with bad teeth, guns, knives, and clubs, ranging from four to six feet tall, and one Viking. He stiffened and gripped the rail of the ladder.

A woman's voice cut through the crowd, and the men parted for their chief, giving Morrison welcome breathing space. He looked her over in the daylight: she was about forty, he supposed, stern, lean, and elegant, with a wistful softness half-hidden in her harsh manner, hung with three handguns that he could see, two belt-knives, and a slender gold wedding band. "You're Zhu Hong," said Morrison, praying that he was right, and that she did speak English.

"You may call me Captain Swann," she said, extending her hand. "Welcome to the _Qiang Jue_. We can talk on the bridge."

Morrison shook her hand, a bit dizzy, and the Captain turned to a turbaned Indian at her shoulder and muttered something that sent him off with a smile and a nod. The rest of the marines clambered up from the ladder and followed her through the gauntlet of scruffy, colorful, blood-shot-eyed foreigners to the control room, where wide windows looked out over the bow of the boat and a huge bank of levers, wheels, and gauges vied for space with a chart-strewn table. Morrison glanced at the charts. Each was labeled in a different language.

Captain Swann swept the charts into a neat stack, stowed them in a caddy above the table, hung a compass, ruler, and slide-rule on the wall, and gracefully gestured for the men to sit. They sat on the table, feet dangling, and the Captain leaned against the wheel console, giving them a gentile smile. Instinctively, the marines straightened their shoulders and folded their hands in their laps.

The door swung open and a dark young woman entered with a serving tray, a clay teapot, and seven mismatched Japanese cups. "Would you care to take tea?" asked the Captain, and the marines stared for a moment, then nodded uncertainly. The serving girl rolled her eyes and braced the tea tray against her stomach as Captain Swann poured.

"Are you Australian?" Morrison blurted.

The girl snorted, and Captain Swann paused. "No," she said simply, hiding a smile.

"I am," said the girl, with a jerk of her head that sent her wavy black hair swinging. Captain Swann passed out the little handle-less teacups, and the girl helped, gripping Coulter's hand quite unnecessarily and murmuring into his ear, "Watch you don't crack the taster, old fellow," before a glare from the Captain sent her sashaying from the door, swinging the tray in one hand and the pot in the other. Coulter flushed.

"Worse than her father," Captain Swann muttered as she took a sip.

"Yours?" Coulter squeaked.

Captain Swann hiccupped as though about to spit out her mouthful of tea, but she clamped her lips down and managed to swallow instead of spraying them all. "Certainly not." She cleared her throat, and looked them in the eyes one by one. "Kwang-Ho will bring boiled ham for you shortly. What is your business on Hainan?"

_Oh_, thought Morrison grimly. He looked at the floor, out the window onto the rabble of armed men who obviously thought well of their captain, at the door, at the woman herself and her three handguns.

"Let me assure you we are allies here," she said, noting their silence. "The _Qiang Je_, for the moment, is as much opposed to the Japanese as the United States are. For a detachment of six men in a Resistance camp, there are two possible missions: educating your superiors or educating the soldiers. From what my men saw of you last night, you are succeeding at neither."

The men looked at each-other. Coulter shrugged; Morrison stared at the ceiling; their friends had nothing to say. "That's about right," Coulter said.

"Has Qiao Hengtai spoken with you?"

"Who?"

"Do you speak _Hanyu_?"

"No, ma'am."

"None of you?"

"No, ma'am."

"Neither do you speak _Hlai_, I assume."

"No, ma'am." Coulter smiled sheepishly.

"How long have you camped with Qiao Hengtai's men?"

"Five months next week, ma'am," said Coulter, while Morrison was still counting the number on his fingers.

Captain Swann's face darkened, and she passed a slender, battered hand across her lined forehead. "In that time, what have you done for the Resistance? What have they let you do?"

"We didn't do squat, ma'am," said Coulter. "Sat on our asses eatin' rice pudding."

"Well," put in Morrison, "our orders were to teach the rebels how to build mines and explosives, help them conduct raids, build shelters, coordinate communications, that kind of thing."

"But we didn't _do_ nothing," Coulter finished.

"We helped lug supplies," Joshua Stone put in.

"Gentlemen, what languages _do_ you speak?" the Captain demanded.

"Me and Josh, we speak Chinese. Brandon's learning Japanese, isn't that right?"

Morrison nodded and shrugged. He'd been learning out of a book. He wasn't doing well.

"Say 'good morning,'" said the Captain to Coulter.

"Good morning. Ma'am," said Coulter cheekily.

"Say it in Chinese."

"Zao an."

She winced at his accent. "You speak Mandarin. Hainan is more provincial than the mainland, but people speak Mandarin everywhere. The Resistance is holding out on you."

"Damn riceys," Coulter remarked. "Why?"

"For the same reason Feng Baiju is holding out on us," said Captain Swann.

"Who?"

"The 'King of Hainan,' he's been called. The general of the Column. We brought him here from Mount Murui yesterday, and he said nothing of Americans."

"Well, that's dumb," said Coulter. "With all we've got—"

"Your valuable expertise?" asked Captain Swann lightly. "Feng Baiju is a politician. He is a Communist for the Communists, but on Hainan, he acts for himself. He wants to win this war, drive out the Japanese on the one hand and the Kuomintang on the other, but he needs a Hainanese victory fought by Hainanese. You are not wanted, not needed, and excluded as a matter of policy." She sipped her tea and crossed her leather boots.

"Okay, then," said Coulter.

"Have you any munitions?" she asked.

"No, ma'am. Just the Garands and a couple ammo boxes."

A tap on the door, and an Asian man in full Japanese officer's dress entered with an old paint bucket full of fragrant ham soup and a stack of pretty blue-and-white bowls. They hopped off the table as Captain Swann and the crewman set the bowls out, sloshed the soup around, and portioned it out, then, following the Captain's lead, they each took a bowl and slurped from it.

Captain Swann dabbed at her mouth with a faded red handkerchief. "I know of a large village in Chekiang where you would be needed," she announced, as matter-of-factly as remarking that a water barrel ought to be loaded into the port-and-forward locker. Josh Stone spat broth all over her trousers, and Morrison choked.

"So sorry, ma'am, Captain," Stone stammered, staring at the mess while the other men were still processing Captain Swann's proposal.

"No matter," she assured him. "Nothing stains black."

"Our orders are to work _here_," said Donald Halliday. "Command wants intelligence from Hainan. Whether the Column lets us pitch in is their problem."

Captain Swann raised an eyebrow at him. "They seem to have decided, one way or the other, to keep any intelligence from leaving Hainan. If you made more of an effort, you would find them far less pleasant."

"You're not saying—" said Halliday.

"Wars are full of accidents," said the Captain.

Coulter grinned. "Black pants again, hey? I read you."

Halliday was not convinced. "They've been fine fellows so far," he protested. "We could just…stay here, where Command knows we've gone, and, well, keep radioing in and making nice with the locals."

Morrison stared at him as though he'd grown a second head. "Then what are we here for? We came to China to fight Japan!"

"We're here to sit on our asses and eat rice pudding, ain't that right, Donny?" said Coulter. "Come on, man, don't you want to show some farmers how to build a mine?"

"You want to _desert?_ Is that what you're saying, Dale? Because that sounds a lot like desertion, just up and leaving our post to go to Chekkang—_with a hundred likely robbers and murderers,_" Halliday snapped, finishing with a whisper and a sideways glare at Captain Swann and her half-smile.

"That's Chek-_**e**_-ang, right, ma'am?" said Coulter brightly. "And I'm sure if we, say, got taken under duress by a hostile gunboat, made our heroic escape by the new moon, landed in Chekiang, and continued to serve the Home of the Free in the village of our kind rescuers who just happened to be a burgeoning Resistance outfit…I see a medal in my future, Donny. None for you."

"I think I'm in," Morrison mused.

"You think, or you are?" asked Coulter.

"I'm in."

"You're both morons," said Halliday. "I hope you get stabbed."

Coulter elbowed Halliday out of the way of the soup pail, and ignored his glare as he refilled his bowl. "You must be swell at poker, Captain Swann."

"I've had practice," she said wryly. "We sail at noon; bring what you can carry."

* * *

Feng Baiju and the guerrilla base in Mount Murui are real, as is the Women's Detachment. Feng Baiju remains a national hero of Hainan. Chekiang is a coastal province of China whose natives had a fierce reputation. Hanyu and Hlai are Chinese dialect groups. America did send Marines to China to train resistance forces, and they had some crazy adventures. Everything else was pulled out of the ether.

Sorry about the flashbacks, everyone, but by now I'm in this up to my neck, so I'm going to wade out of it. Please, in the name of all that's holy, drop a review and tell me if something else has gone horribly wrong! I'm begging you!

Thanks, as always, for reading.


	5. Blue on Black

**Blue on Black  
**

_Match on a fire._

_Christmas Eve, 1944. South China Sea._

For three days, Coulter and Morrison had been guests on _Qiang Je._ The Australian girl, called Sally, who seemed to be the only person on the ship besides the Captain who spoke English, had been teasing Coulter relentlessly, borrowing his hat in fun and forgetting to return it as she hung from the bow anchor chain and dangled her feet in the spray, leaning her chin on his shoulder and muttering in his ear about things like axle grease and bolt sizes, chattering with the rest of the crew in five languages at once, and teaching him phrases that half the time got him a drink of water or a wrench or whatever it was that he wanted, and half the time got him laughed at, punched, or patted indulgently on the head. "Gol, I'm gonna smack her one next time!" Coulter panted, flopping against the rail next to Morrison as the sun set, his grease-smudged hat crumpled in one hand.

"She might like that," said Morrison, who was sitting in much the same position as he had when Coulter had run past him an hour ago. "Strange girl."

Sally's drawling yowl ripped across the deck, and in a moment the girl herself was stooped over Coulter's head, callused feet straddling the deck, shirt dangling on her shoulders. "Got ya! Bounce below again, would you? The boiler still thinks he's clapped out." She grabbed one of Coulter's limp arms and hauled.

"Sally—_Sally!_" Coulter sputtered. "Why don't you pick on Morrie for a while?"

She looked Morrison over, twitched her lip, and turned back to Coulter. "I don't want some lump sittin' watchin' me work. Boiler needs a man's touch, y'know, and it gets _so_," here she leaned her nose into Coulter's face and shrugged her shirt to the edge of her collarbone, "_sweltering_ down there."

Morrison watched Coulter trudge to the open hatch as Sally danced about him, and gave him a mocking wave. Coulter gave him the middle finger before he disappeared.

"Her father had the decency to be clever about it," said Captain Swann. Morrison glanced up. She had finally emerged from the control room, where she'd spent the whole morning shut up among her maps, listening for radio transmissions and doing trigonometry. Her lips were pursed, pensive.

"Does she . . . know her father?" asked Morrison.

"Right down to business, are we?" Captain Swann leaned her elbows on the railing, facing the sea, and Morrison craned his head around to look up at her. "Not well, that I know, and if she did, I expect she might make at least an effort to restrain herself. Not that she is my business. Handy about the ship."

"But she knew you."

"No."

"No?" said Morrison, confused. "What's she doing here?"

Captain Swann smirked. "She wanted to live in interesting times. That meant my outfit, now that her father seems…out of commission." She looked him in the eye now, the sun cutting across her eyelashes and lining out a fine scar on her cheek. "Is this what you always do all day?"

"What, this?" Morrison raised his hands and let them drop to his sides. "Someone tells me work, I'll do it." He smiled sheepishly. "Guess I don't get asked much."

"Then you will never learn the tasks that you rely on your mates to perform," said Captain Swann coldly.

Morrison waited, but she did not seem about to give him an order, only stared out at the sun on the waves. "Is he all right?" he asked abruptly.

Captain Swann flinched back, fear and guilt flicking over her face. "Hm? Who?"

"Sally's father. You seemed…I dunno, worried. I'm sorry."

"Oh," she said, the guilt fading to concern. "He is…we are not in touch. But he…his…" She sighed, left the railing, and sat next to Morrison, who watched her. "When my husband…when we were first married, he had to go away to sea a long time. He saw," she swallowed, "many strange things. When he came back, he told me that ships have souls. I believe him."

Morrison accepted this, and nodded.

She smiled a pained smile. "Have you heard of the _Black Pearl_."

"I think—on the radio once, back home—"

"Old ship, a very old ship. You know the Ship of Theseus?"

"Can't say I do," said Morrison. "What is it?"

"Legend," she said with a smile, as though the word had some special meaning to her, "was that the Athenians preserved the hero Theseus' ship for centuries, by slowly replacing its rotted wood until not a bit of the original ship was left. The question is, after so long, is she still the same ship?" She fixed him with her eyes, waiting for what he would say.

"I—I'd think so," said Morrison. "Same with a house, I think. It would change a little, but it's not as though you scrap the whole thing and get another one."

"Jack agreed, from what I heard. What he paid for the _Pearl_…she had to be the same ship; even when he lost her, he was still a part of her, just as she was part of him," said Captain Swann, looking away and worrying at her ring with her hard fingers. "She was _so _old."

"But they captured her," said Morrison, frowning, remembering an old broadcast. "The Brits, I think."

"Caught her and put her on dry-dock," snapped the Captain, staring down through the deck. "Arrested the whole crew. They escaped in a massive jailbreak. But the ship…what do you know about sailing, Mr. Morrison?"

He frowned and searched himself. "Not much. My uncle had a little yacht, though."

"The_ Black Pearl_ was no 'little yacht,'" she said. "She was a three-masted _ship_. She needed a half-dozen men to sail, two dozen to maneuver as she was built to, and when she had them, she was the fastest ship that ever ran before the wind. A ship," she said to Morrison with helpless eyes, "is nothing without a crew. And I think, on the night of that jailbreak, the crew did not want to sail anymore."

Morrison nodded. There was nothing to say, and he thought, from an echo of memory, he knew the end to this story.

"In the old days," said Captain Swann in clipped tones, "any port was full of skilled sailors who jumped at any work that paid. _Sailors,_ understand. Men who knew knots and wind, who would crawl on the end of a yard-arm and reef sail in a hurricane, sleep in hammocks in the damp and dark between bells, and jump out and risk their limbs again. But that was long, long ago. You see the problem," and her voice caught, "when the crew did not want to sail."

"Oh," breathed Morrison.

"The dry-dock had a fire," said the Captain. "And now the_ Black Pearl_ is gone. Jack had to—he killed his own ship. I never imagined…"

Morrison hugged his arms to his chest; even in the tropical heat, he imagined himself on the South Pole, ice closing in, alone on a white plain as far as he could see. "I'm so sorry," he murmured.

Captain Swann rubbed her eye and inspected her finger, as though something were stuck to it. "Don't be," she muttered. "Wasn't my ship."

"I'm still sorry," said Morrison. "He was a friend, still."

"After a fashion," said the Captain, getting to her feet. "Can you shoot a gun on Christmas Day?"

"What?" Morrison hauled himself up respectfully. "I suppose—"

"Clean your repeater, then," she announced, all business. "She could see action tomorrow, if anything goes bad."

And then the strange woman was gone, patrolling the deck, inspecting the guns, talking to the men in Cantonese, Hakka, and Mandarin, and in Japanese, Malay, and Korean, ordering a boy to catch the milk goat, who had been let up from below to take air and was currently nibbling on the wiring atop the "island" that held the engine room, checking bandages, conferring, calculating. Morrison looked overhead, where the black flag snapped in the wind, and began to regret ever speaking to Captain Swann on Hainan Island.

Coulter burst up from below, fresh grease smudged across his face and nursing a smashed thumb. "I don't care what she says!" he gasped, grabbing Morrison by the arm. "It's your turn, the next ten times!"

* * *

"May you live in interesting times." --Old Chinese curse. 


	6. War

**War**

_What is it good for? Stand up and shout it!  
_

* * *

_Christmas morning, 1944. South China Sea._

"She's small," said Morrison, passing his binoculars to Coulter.

"Just our size," said Coulter, grinning, and Morrison stared at him in disbelief.

"You know what a black flag means," he protested. "If it gets out we went along with this, we're done for."

"Whatever will be, will be," said Coulter with a shrug. "I'm more worried about those sub-hunters than a court-martial."

Midday had brought them in sight of a convoy off their starboard bow, and they had drawn steadily closer until now they could see the whole flock: eleven Daihatsus, fifty-foot barges that could creep right onto a beachhead and drop off their cargo from a landing ramp, and two fearsome submarine hunters for escort. They were taller and longer than _Qiang Jue_, and while they mostly relied on torpedoes and depth charges, they bore huge long-range sea-to-sea and sea-to-air cannons. _Qiang Jue_ bore two cannibalized deck guns and three mortars in addition to its original armament, but Morrison still did not relish the thought of floating in the teeth of an angered Japanese vessel half-again the length of his own.

Since dawn, the crew had dressed the ship up like a damaged Japanese patroller: switched out the black hammer-and-cutlass that flew from the pole atop the island for the Rising Sun, strung up a series of signal flags, torn down their own radio mast so that it dangled over the bow like a branch dropped in a storm, painted on a new name, strapped canvas over the stern and some of the windows, and lit a thickly smoking mixture of rubber and axle grease in a brazier near the engines. They limped toward the convoy at less than half their usual speed, and many of the crew on deck in Japanese uniform wore slings about their necks, ready to stick their arms in them as they closed with their prey.

Captain Swann, hair stuffed under an ensign's cap, stood nearby at the bow, conferring in Japanese with two men and a mannish old woman as they listened to a portable radio like the one Morrison and Coulter had left on Hainan with Halliday and the others. She laughed at something, carelessly as if they were not about to snatch a sheep from under the noses of the two engines of doom that towered over the barges.

"Mr. Morrison, was it?" she called to them. Morrison jumped and clutched the binoculars. "You told me you are learning Japanese. Come listen."

He slunk over and stood by the radio. He could pick out a syllable of the transmission here and there; the voice seemed nervous and irritable.

"They were hailing us this past hour," the Captain explained with quiet eagerness. "The frontrunner's captain is unsure of himself. He flies the flags to signal for 'radio hail,' and we fly 'radio inoperative.' Surprises confuse him, it seems."

"What if he comes to investigate?" Morrison asked.

"He will not." She pulled a length of ruddy-stained gauze from her pocket and wound it about her face, running it under her hat and over her jaw and thinly covering one eye.

There was a puff of smoke from the lead escort, and an instant later a roar that sent Morrison three feet in the air and left his ears ringing.

Captain Swann smiled and patted his arm condescendingly. "That was a signal shot," she explained, then bellowed something in Chinese that brought an answering shout from near the deck cannon. _Qiang Jue_'s own cannon went off with a thoom that shook the whole deck. "You Yankees have been abovedecks long enough," she said. "Take your friend below, Mr. Morrison, and keep out of the way."

Morrison grabbed a protesting Coulter by the arm and scurried down through the echoing hull, where every narrow hallway was filled with pirates joking and lounging as they stuffed cartridges into clips for a motley of automatic weapons: Stens, Thompsons, BARs, and others that could have been Japanese, Russian, or German for all he knew. They spotted Sally on their way to the deepest, quietest pit of the hold, and she gave them an uncharacteristic, nervous little grin before looking back to the shortened automatic in her lap.

"So, do we break out the tourniquets?" Coulter asked, trying to be flippant.

Sally wrinkled her nose and polished her gun more vigorously. "That'd be right. If any alarm gets out, we're fair rooted."

"We can't be too careful," said Morrison, failing to will away his panic.

"That's the truth. You be careful, I'll be careful. Go hide."

* * *

Elizabeth loosened her sleeve cuffs as sweatdrops pricked through her bandage, listening to the radio operator's harried demands of "radio hail, gunboat, radio hail," and in the background a shouting voice that could only be the escort's captain. "Give it up," said someone else, faintly, and the transmission shut off. 

"Switch to 43.2, please," she told Ono Toru, a small man with a pink fish tattooed beside his left eye. The radio hissed, warbled, and cut to: "—those Japs a hiddin'! Yee-Haw!' 'Get off the radio, Stan.' 'Yee-Haw! Come on! Intelligence finally gives us a juicy bone, an' here's you bein' the stick-in-the-mud. This is one o' those turn-the-battle things here, it's a turn-the-war thing—' 'Get off the radio, you horse-ass—'"

Captain Swann switched back to the escort boats' frequency with a smile, back to the silence. "They are on their way."

Creeping through the hours, _Qiang Jue_ closed with the convoy until they could see the forms of the other ships' crew with unaided eyes, still signaling by flags. _Radio inoperative,_ they waved. _Engaged vessel forty kilometers SSE: enemy retreated. Engines operative at reduced speed. Minor hull damage. Major crew casualties. Fit for escort duty._

The lead sub-hunter replied that they should take a position at the edge of the flock of barges, forming a triangle of the three warships. Elizabeth watched at the railing as Song, the acting helmsman, steered them near the side of a vessel at the fringe of the convoy. This barge had only one small tent at the stern for its crew, and the rest of it carried cargo.

She smiled as she watched Ono take up a bullhorn and lounge against the rail. It was these times, watching the men work unbidden on her orders, that she felt a restrained exhilaration somehow richer than the thrill of roaring "Fire!" at a spring-tight crouching guncrew in the dark, or waking the blast-breath of a bazooka on her trembling shoulder with the twitch of a finger. Ono walked in words, nudging men's and women's minds here and there as though they were so many horses, and he their stocksman. Captain Swann was pleased to have him in her pocket.

She imagined carrying live scorpions in her pocket would be similarly thrilling, though less useful.

Ono glanced at her, and she jerked her head at him. He lifted the bullhorn, smiling and laughing like a man who had just engaged Scylla and the sea serpent and escaped bursting to tell the tale. "Hi, there!" he called. "In the name of all that's holy, can you spare a spot of sake and a radio? Ours got shot. God, are we glad to see you!"

She left the deck to open the stairwell, releasing a puff of muggy, humanized air, and peered down into darkness and the glitter of rifles. "I admire your enthusiasm, gentlemen," she told them in Cantonese, "but we don't want to terrify those dozen sailors any more than necessary."

The glint of gunsteel was joined by the glint of teeth.

"We've less than an hour," she informed them. "The convoy has no reason to turn on us, and Ono is charming the barge."

She took the upward stairs to the control room, where Song stood at the wheel and a dozen observers lounged against the walls and consoles.

"Ono's moving in," announced a Philipino gunner, pointing down at the deck. The barge had closed with the ship, and _Qiang Jue_'s uniformed Japanese pirates were clustered at the rail, helping tie it to the side and crowding around to grin and wave. Ono had abandoned the bullhorn, and was now climbing down to make nice with the navy men.

"Very good," said the Captain. She unpacked the radio and slammed it down on the table, turning it now to one channel, now the other, listening to silence on both ends. Song, who knew his business, drew _Qiang Jue_ to the fringe of the convoy, just close enough to play the loyal guard.

They waited.

* * *

I wouldn't have the guts to play masquerade with two enemy ships, but Elizabeth, as Gibbs so helpfully put it, is a bit daft.

Early in the war, the Japanese used large ships to transport goods and personnel. Most of them eventually got sunk by the Allies, whose submarines gave them a lot of trouble, and so the Japanese had to switch to very small boats, the shallow-draft, broad, flat barges we have here.


	7. I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

**I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day  
**

_The Cannon thundered in the South.  
_

* * *

_Christmas evening, 1944. South China Sea._

The hour she had predicted passed without result.

Ono, on the barge, had sent one of his friends down the hatchway to grab some jugs of beer to keep the barge crew occupied, and the Captain caught him on the way up and shoved a big handful of dice into his pockets.

The whole control room was already nervous: _Qiang Jue_ was well within shooting range of both large escorts, and very soon, radio or no, she would be expected to authenticate herself. Dark was coming, but radar could keep the escorts on their tail indefinitely, should they choose to pursue. The trick would be to get completely out of range without the hunters suspecting them.

"It's been a while, Chief. Should we excuse ourselves?" Song asked. A groan circled the control room, and one of the gunners dialed the radio back and forth between frequencies. Silence.

Captain Swann picked up a pair of binoculars and scanned the escort ships: they could have been sleeping, though that wouldn't likely last. "In time," she told him. "Bjorn, pass the word to burn another jar of smoking grease in the stern, if you would."

"Aye, Zhu Hong," said the Viking, and stumped down the stairs. His Cantonese was bad, but better than his English.

She stifled a sigh. "Song, feather the throttle; let them see us limping. Ono will know what to say." It seemed the whole take for _Qiang Jue_ today would be whatever Ono had found in the barge crew's pockets. Captain Swann hated to drop a pursuit, but this was no time to be stubborn.

She herself took the ladder to the island's roof, overlooking the ship, the convoy, and Ono and his supporting cast, opened a chest of silk flags, and began to hook together the signal for_ returning to home port for repair. _She sat on the blanket-sized Stars and Stripes that lay taut against the steel decking, concealed from the boats' eyes, and huffed to herself, watching a fresh plume of noxious smoke roil out of the stern, feeling the ship lurch under her at Song's touch. The last signal on the mast under the Rising Sun, _fit for escort duty_, stayed up. They had every reason to dawdle. Soon they would be turning around, putting their wake to the ships, and they would be lost beyond the horizon before the escorts put together that no gunboat with their name ought to have been near this area.

On the deck, a few navy men from the barge had climbed up to the _Qiang Jue_ carrying toolkits, and now trooped cheerfully down the pitch-dark hatchway, presumably to help their fellow Japanese with the engines.

Captain Swann started in horror as the men disappeared below, and stifled a rain of curses.

By letting them board, and encounter the rest of the crew, Ono Toru had just let them fall into a bloody hostage crisis. There was no way now _Qiang Jue_ could simply slip toward Japan out of sight, not with three Japanese crew in the hands of the riled brigands blocking the halls belowdecks.

For them to get away, the barge had to rejoin the convoy without raising an alarm. They barge's crew now had to be silenced--but bound, unconscious men could not drive. Perhaps Ono could tie the tiller and use the tents to shield the captain's place from view: then if by some miracle the sea stayed flat, the convoy kept straight, and no one turned their binoculars too closely to the crew tent, _Qiang Jue_ might be able to release the barge, then play injured and limp toward Japan far enough to lose the escorts.

They might.

Captain Swann was furious. Where before, she had had a decent plan—risky, but with good enough rewards and an excellent escape route—now she had a very bad plan, a foolhardy plan, a bloody stupid daft plan for no reason at all but the judgment lapse of an irresponsible Japanese negotiator.

She grunted in frustration, biting her fist, then took a slow breath, lowered herself down the ladder to the deck, and limped across to the men at the railing, favoring one foot and clutching an arm to her chest, keeping the bandaged side of her face toward the barge. Pulling to the edge of the little crowd, she grabbed a friend of Ono's by the elbow. "Why don't we share that tuna we caught this morning with these sailors?" she whispered in his ear. "Tell them about the sake, too, the aged jug. Give anyone who declines the invitation a nap. Take your time, and tie the steering." He nodded, and offered her a pitcher of beer and a mug, which she waved off. She glanced down over the rail at the barge and saw Ono and three of her crew working some sort of eight-way dice game with the barge crew, playing for cigarettes. She forced herself to nod approval; no sense in unsettling them during such a delicate operation.

She returned to the stifling glassed-in control tower, and watched as a whole passel of hungry sailors swarmed up the railing and filed down the hatchway to the waiting pirates, no doubt to be clubbed and trussed: the first stage of a fruitless retreat.

There were no shots fired below, and for that she was grateful.

"Stern and port!" the Philipino shouted, breaking her thoughts.

Captain Swann and everyone who was able spun about. A tiny shadow rose above the horizon in the South-East.

Elizabeth lunged for the radio and turned to 42.3. "'—in sight. Torpedoes ready? Sound off.' 'Ready.' 'Ready.' 'Roger.' 'Ready.' 'You know it!' 'Ready.' 'Check all! Whoop!'"

She grinned. The men around her cheered, and she fairly panted with triumph.

"How long?" Song asked. He had barely taken his eyes off his course and the vessels beside them.

"Minutes," said the Captain. "Begin to move off."

Another young Chinese man listened to the calls of the radio. "What are they saying?"

"They are readying their bombs," Elizabeth breathed, before snapping to the next task. She reached into a jacket pocket, pulled out a small booklet printed on thin, waterproof paper, and turned it to the day's date. "Quiet, may I have quiet please, men. Thank-you." She took up the microphone and began to broadcast, muffling the sound under a handkerchief, dragging out an American accent, and deepening her voice. "Fox, oboe, negat, one, zero, niner. The fresco is on the East wall. Fox, oboe, negat, one, zero, niner. The fresco is on the East wall. This is Private Morrison, Marine reconnaissance. Come in, flyboys, over."

"Get off the radio, Dick, we're on a torpedo run, here, over."

"Roger that, flight commander, I'm watching your approach as we speak. The south-west gunboat is not Japanese, over."

"What the hell?" The flight commander fairly spat into his microphone.

"Repeat, the south-west gunboat is friendly. Pass the word to spare the boat with the Stars and Stripes on the roof. We'll start shooting when you start bombing; right now we're incognito. Thank-you kindly for stepping in, over and out."

Captain Swann set down the microphone with a click, as the flight commander shouted for Morrison to repeat himself, and switched to the navy's frequency, where the escorts' captains were exchanging battle plans: they, also, had sighted the incoming torpedo planes. "I will run up the flags for 'enemy sighted,'" she announced. "Song, you can start breaking away in earnest."

Outside, the whine of Helldiver engines sang over the water, and she looked down at the barge in satisfaction: two genuine navy men lay hogtied next to an overturned table, and Ono stood over them, signing her the thumbs-up. She strung together the appropriate signal, fingering the black flag that lay in the box beside the silk: coarse, bullet-ridden, fading. Hers.

* * *

_Enemy sighted SE_ fluttered aloft under the Rising Sun, and Elizabeth laughed. 

The convoy was dissolving, barges stringing out into a broad fan, the forward boats piling on speed and the rear boats cutting power, to present as thin a killing ground as possible to the incoming planes. _Qiang Jue,_ as it sped off to the South, might have been following procedure but for the barge strapped to its side.

Faster and faster the planes closed, looming blocky, clumsy, with big tails and enormous round noses, their shadows streaking over the water, as the escorts brought their antiaircraft cannons to bear and at last unleashed a gut-shocking roar of gunfire. The planes swept overhead—so many of them, twelve planes for twelve vessels—and stooping to the sea like gulls, great columns of torpedoes fell. All of them hit the water beyond _Qiang Jue._

As escorts and barges began to founder, as the blasts boomed with fire and spray, Song pounded the throttle and showed their massive wake to the convoy.

"Run out the crane!" Captain Swann bellowed, half-leaping, half-sliding down the island ladder to the deck. She cranked open the hatchway. "All's well! Load this catch, so we can cut the barge away to run free!"

Guns forgotten, her crew poured, blinking, into the daylight, the American marines bringing up the rear. Coulter and Morrison were treated to the retreating sight of a flight of American torpedo planes sinking a tiny convoy of insignificant warships and small supply barges, as _Qiang Jue_'s crew swung crates of who-knew-what and bundles of cloth and food onto the deck by a swinging boom crane.

As Captain Swann stood on a low rung of the ladder, calling out to the men to direct the flow of heavy boxes and sort supplies for storage, Sally poked her in the ankle. "Cap'n," said Sally, catching her at a pause. "What'd'you say we do with the Japs in the cafeteria?"

"Get Bjorn to haul them up and dump them in the barge," the Captain replied carelessly, before yelling in Korean, "Kim! Go left!" and averting a collision between two men with boxes in front of their eyes.

"That'll be a bit tricky without tying them up first," said Sally. "How about we just wave some beer in their faces and _lead_ them to their barge—"

"Navy men are loose in our ship?" Captain Swann demanded, alarmed. "Have you no idea the damage they can do?"

"Why would they? They think we're one of theirs."

Captain Swann blinked down at the flighty bronze face below her. "Do you mean they don't yet know they were captured?"

"They're eatin' fish and drinkin' sake as we speak, Cap'n."

"But the men, the guns! How did they not see—"

"The hall light's broke. I had 'em scoot back a bit when the Japs came. Greeted the boys myself!"

"What of your accent?"

"They thought I had a lithp."

"But with a woman aboard—"

"They thought I had a cold, too, and it was pitch dark. They're full out stonkered, Cap'n. You could play Girl From Ipanema, hand a bloke a mop, and he'd kiss it and tango 'cross the deck."

Sally grinned, and Captain Swann broke into a surprised smile. "So all this time," the Captain said, "we could have returned these gentlemen to their vessel, sent them along, and made a clean retreat by the original plan."

Sally nodded, then hooked an elbow around the ladder in a show of nonchalance.

"_Whoever_ thought this up," said Captain Swann, still smiling, "that was very clever. If the planes had not come, that could very well have saved the ship."

"Don't act so surprised, Cap'n," said Sally, her grin tightening into what to Captain Swann was a long-familiar smirk. "After all, I _am_—"

"Get below and do not finish that sentence," Captain Swann growled. Sally huffed and stalked off. "Insufferable…"

* * *

Helldiver: a genuine name for a genuine plane, a carrier-launched torpedo bomber. 

Well, I hope that wasn't too boring. I tried real hard to tighten up those last two chapters._  
_


	8. O Holy Night

**O Holy Night**

_In sin and error pining.__  
_

* * *

_2nd Day of Christmas, 1944. South China Sea._

The following night after the action—he could not decide whether to call it a robbery, war crime, or Allied victory—Brandon Morrison stood leaning on the rail at the bow of _Qiang Jue_, staring at a distant orange pinprick that could be Mars, or the light of a house. Coulter had heard they were nearing land.

Morrison saw the glint of gold in the corner of his eye and looked over his shoulder. It was Captain Swann, the shimmer a ring, or an earring, or the butt of a derringer. The half moon was the only light on the deck, and Morrison had left the warm, lit cafeteria, and the dubious company of Sally and the crew, to watch the water break before the bow and feel the cold moist breeze on his hair.

Captain Swann held out a small booklet printed on waterproof paper. "You may have this back, now."

Morrison was astonished how casually she admitted these things: first announcing her single-handed intention to move the marines wherever she saw fit, and now displaying a stolen copy of radio communications codes, one of the most guarded documents in American reconnaissance. It probably was only a copy by now, he thought, taking the booklet and slipping it carefully into an inside pocket. Coulter had been carrying the booklet last; they had discovered it was missing shortly before the planes had arrived. He knew who had had her hands all over Coulter's pockets. "Did Sally take it?"

Captain Swann nodded, and rested her slim hands on the rail, the lines of her face cleaving the wind like the prow through the water.

Morrison silenced himself and stared ahead. He longed to be on land again, on Hainan in his tent with Joshua and Ned and Warren and even Donald Halliday, waiting out the war with nothing to do but watch. Wherever he was going, the Captain had promised, there would be work for the war. He could not, in good conscience, be angry with her for that.

He looked over his shoulder again, and found her staring into the dark, the moonlight silver over her hair and forehead. Her brocade black coat dropped from her shoulders like a warrior's mail, sucking the silver into itself. Her hand glittered.

"Are you a widow?" he asked.

She jerked her hands from the rail and whirled, dropping for an instant into a fighting crouch, then she straightened stiffly. "That tongue will get you shot," she grated.

Morrison looked her in the eyes, the late hour and the tension of the last few days making him bold and stupid.

"No," said Captain Swann, softening and turning back to the sea. "Not that I know."

Only her right hand reached up to touch the railing now.

"Where is he?" asked Morrison softly.

She smiled, shut her eyes, and bared her teeth as though in pain, jaws shifting silently, then she bent her head in shadow. Morrison heard the hiss of breath through teeth. When at last she spoke, her voice was level. "Would you break a promise to your wife," she asked him.

Morrison's mouth opened and shut. "I—I'm not married," he said. She stared at him, silver and shadow, and he scuffled for an answer. "I suppose—it depends on the promise—"

"I made a promise to my husband," she said. "I promised to never, you might say, go behind his back. Trick him. Betray his trust. Now my word," and she gave a stilted laugh, "the word of a pirate, is not much. But this promise is."

She glanced sidelong at him, as though daring him to question her. Morrison lowered his eyes, and she looked away.

"We had survived so much," she murmured. "He had to go away to sea when we were first married, and his…his employer…" She trailed off and took a breath. "We freed him."

Her whisper held such triumph that Morrison stared.

She looked him in the face, and he edged away. "You are going to Chekiang tomorrow, and you will never see me again. Understand this means I can tell you anything, without consequence."

He nodded.

"My husband decided he needed no more of life," she said simply.

Morrison furrowed his brow. "Was—was he ill?" he asked.

"No."

"Suic—did he—"

"Watch your tongue. No. There are many things in this world you do not know, Mr. Morrison. But he had made up his mind to live an ordinary life, for our family. He wanted to stay with our family, run out our years with them, die like them. He was too honest. And I had made him a promise that I would not break. I could not…slip it into his tea, or dump it in the well, or carry him off to the Antilles… I am making no sense to you."

Morrison nodded again.

"He would want me by his side," said Captain Swann, "when the time came, and while I could not force him, I would be damned if I gave him that, if I made it easy. So I ran away from home."

She looked, for an instant, lost and helpless as a child as she said those words.

"Where is he?" Morrison asked again.

"I don't know," said Captain Swann, her voice breaking. "Not dead. Looking for me, I expect. Mr. Morrison, do you think me a wicked woman?"

He stared for a long moment, his mind whirling, as the Captain, lined in quicksilver and the black of shark's eyes, stared back at him with her throat tightening in anxiety, and he could find no answer. "I don't know," he said, earnest, almost pleading.

The Captain looked away and rubbed the scar on her left hand, spinning the little gold band this way and that, before she smiled at him—a sad smile, but his fear left him. "You thought," she said. "You tried. Thank-you."

Morrison watched her coat ripple above the heels of her boots as she returned to the ship's island, perhaps to pore over some hand-written copy she had surely made of the code book, or to listen for radio signals, or fall asleep staring at a harbor map. He hoped she might be happy.

* * *

The following afternoon, _Qiang Jue_ left Coulter and Morrison alone in a river village full of smiling children and men desperate for two more pairs of arms. The first week, they contacted Command on a borrowed radio and fed them their story. For the first month, they and the villagers built road mines. By the third month, they coordinated a militia detachment that waylaid Japanese supply trains, provisioning guerrillas and harassing the inland invaders in a single effort. As Coulter had predicted, it was the sort of work to get a medal. 

The war ended with a shock, and they heard nothing more of _Qiang Jue_, or the wistful and wily Zhu Hong.

* * *

In case anyone wanted more Elizabeth angst...there you go. Was the convoy battle merely a spacer for her angsting, or the angsting merely bookends for the battle? May we never know. 

No, I have no idea how they got Will back on land. However they did it, it wasn't easy.

If this doesn't make sense---and I wouldn't be surprised---please let me know.


	9. Satisfaction

**Satisfaction**_  
_

_Some useless information s'pposed to fire my imagination. _

* * *

_1971, T minus sixteen days. A road through the outskirts of Suixi , Guangdong Province._

Jack Sparrow—alias Jascha Capitanovich—and the three police officers he had befriended, swerved up the green-framed road toward the women's prison, and within it, Hiu's grandmother Madam Zham. The more athletic of the two officers was telling his story about the British missionary who graced the prison, as his captain drove the little car while tippling deeply from Jack's flask.

"—Now it happened, when this missionary had been reeducated in the great reforms of Beloved Chairman Mao for four months, she was removed from the facility five days, and was brought back. For a hearing, they say. That was the same time they executed that _wokou_ war criminal Zhu Hong—remember Zhu Hong, Hou? She fell in with the Kuomintang, so they say—bad choice of friends. Imagine, she scoffed at our Revolution!" Plowhorse recounted, not noticing when his strange Cossack guest flinched at the name.

_Chief Swan_, Jack translated, numb. "I—heard." So far as he knew, the Whelp had no idea, and Jack was not about to tell him. He wished the policeman would get to the point.

"And then they brought the missionary back," said Plowhorse.

"And?" asked Pudgy. "That doesn't make her _leaving_ the prison."

"I'm not done, Hou. You know Americans and English have all different colored eyes? Now what I heard, the missionary woman before she left for her hearing had green eyes. And when she came back, I heard they were brown."

Pudgy blinked at him, and Jack was twisted in his seat with his lips peeled back in a frozen default grimace. "You don't think they switched the women…" said Pudgy.

"Well, when she came back, she had brown eyes, and she bit three of the guards. Before she was a sweet woman, very kind and good, reading her holy book whenever the lights were on. But afterward, she was dangerous. She tried escaping. She has shackles now—why put a simple missionary spy in shackles?"

"That is patently-ently false," slurred the captain, taking the car in a gentle S across the middle of the empty road. "The Party would never let a dangerous war criminal escape rightful liquidation. You must unnerstand, good Russian, the guards tell idle tales on their watches."

Plowhorse and Pudgy cringed.

"Quite good, quite good," Jack assured him. "It is the nature of guards to tell fanciful tales. I spin a few myself. I also know much wisdom of our good Vladimir Lenin. If you comrades have no more nectarous guardhouse canards to share, I might lecture biliously on the glory of Communism until we reach our destination—"

"Did you know they are to have a Party inspector at the Laogai in a week, Hou," said Plowhorse hurriedly.

"I didn't know," said Pudgy. "Please tell me more."

* * *

They reached the prison at evening, Pudgy having taken over the driving while the captain mumbled to the ceiling in the back seat, and now they stopped at the drive of a foreboding concrete monolith crowned with razor wire and four gun towers. The prisoners at this installation evidently didn't do much farming, for the grounds sat in a cleft between two steep green hills, with hardly a swatch of arable land in sight. Atop one hill was a steel-truss radio tower, with a small red beacon blinking at its crown.

Plowhorse helped the captain to his feet, and Pudgy, after a moment's internal deliberation, put the car keys in one of the captain's shirt pockets.

Jack Sparrow was, if not tense and terrified out of his wits by the shadow of the prison, extremely prepared to run away. He strutted to the gate ahead of the guards, hand on his saber, as he supposed a proud Cossack might do.

Everyone was happy until Pudgy knocked on the door and another policeman came out of the fortress and asked for Jack's papers.

He squinted through his glasses, and gazed at the upside-down warranty Jack handed him for a good while. "This isn't Russian," he announced.

Jack seized the keys from the Captain's shirt and bolted for the car.

* * *

_One week and two hours before the present time. Vancouver, Canada_

In the grimy old bar, under the dimming lights, in cigarette smoke so thick that the cockroaches choked as they rattled from shadow to shadow along the walls, the old bartender was still just starting his story.�

"So the captain's gone a day," Jules recalled, slinging word over word in a quiet drawl, "and then he comes haring back in some ratty little Chinese car, and we load it up in the cargo bay. He holed up in his cabin for a few days, and we'd waylay him every time he came out, and eventually we managed to pry some idea of the prison out of him—some scary-ass concrete Jericho with machine guns on it. We didn't get much particulars.

"See, Captain was the absolute worst man we could have sent in for reconnaissance, because he doesn't tell anyone anything. You'd have better luck grabbing a map and throwing darts at it than if you just asked him where the hell in the ocean you are. Loopy. And from what we did know about the prison…since we were only going in for one old lady—nice old lady, but still—we didn't want to stand much risk."

A grizzled lumberjack rolled the bottom of his glass against the bar in gentle circles. "Captain was no help?"

Jules shook his head. "He was broody. Loopier than usual. I remember I brought him half a six-pack the next morning, and after I handed it to him, he shoved me right out of the cabin and started yelling at the wall. He had his sword out and he was waving it around at nothing; I thought he was going to gut me, to tell the truth, so I scrammed. See, he had this frickin' huge sword he carried around all the time. He had his guns, this sweet Uzi he picked up back when Uzis were new, but he always had the sword with him."

The one woman in the bar, a buzz-cut red-head in a blue flannel shirt, gave a curious low chuckle.

"Eventually he calmed down," said Jules in a long-suffering sigh, "and he called us all to the ballroom—that's what we called the plane's cafeteria, the ballroom—and he hops up on the liquor table and says, 'Listen, you thieving scabrous bastards!'"

Jules paused in his tale as the woman snorted into her beer. "He said that?" she demanded, incredulous.

"You had to know him," said Jules. "We thought it was endearing. Anyway, he says we're going to bust open that _Laogai_ and get Hiu's grandma back home. And then Gung Ngau says 'Didn't we just decide that last week?' and the captain goes kinda like this," and Jules leaned back abruptly and stared down his nose at the bar, then snapped in a rough British accent, "I knew that."

The woman snorted again.

Jules splashed some vodka on the rag before grabbing another glass to wipe, the basketball game catching his eye. A foul, and on the home team, pity. "But that still left us with no idea how to run the prison break. Anyhow, somebody had some crazy-ass idea about tanks, can't say who—thought if we found some small ones, we could fit 'em in the cargo bay. And then Petey said hey, we got bazookas, we got some rockets, we got a jeep, we could make a tank. And everybody kind of laughed him off, but then the captain got this funny look—he had a lot of funny looks, see, but this one meant something—and before we knew it, he had us running out the arc welder, and we made ourselves a couple mini fake tanks out of the jeep and that ratty little car Captain stole on his day trip."

* * *

_The Day__, 1971. Foothills near Suixi Laogai, Guangdong Province._

Dusk had begun to fade. Up the hills, through the mossy-twigged forest that sang with nightbirds and mosquitoes, tramped a rabble clad in smoky blue: dirty men, frightening women, and three nervous ponies. On their backs were sometimes rifles—AK-47s, M-16s, pea-shooters and deer hunters, and even a few venerable misfits like Tommy Guns and Mausers—and sometimes crude wooden models coated in black lacquer, since it was most critical that everyone have some sort of weapon on display. Every man, without exception, carried a handgun—sometimes two.

Jack Sparrow figured, as he sauntered along toward the head of the little troop, that though their jackets were completely unhemmed and the pockets and details were drawn on with black marker, a good little Communist guard would take one look at their white armbands and peg them immediately as Kuomintang. It was the one part of the whole plan he was actually happy about.

* * *

_One week and two hours before the present time, Vancouver._

"We looked like the frickin' Boy Scouts," Jules groaned.

* * *

I went with the fake tanks because it was the stupidest idea I had.

A _Laogai_ is a weird hybrid of sweatshop, public indoctrination facility/high school, and gulag. They're guarded by police, and china does have modern prisons, though they tend to be very, very large compared to anything in the US. This thing is tiny and ridiculously well-guarded. The public planner must have been drunk when he authorized it.

_Wokou_ is a Chinese term for Japanese raiders, or pirates.

My extensive knowledge of WWII-era weaponry is courtesy of watching my brother play Wolfenstein for hours on end.

Anyway, the long crawl up from the flashbacks of the Distant Past begins! Also, China Sea is going on hiatus until probably Spring Break. School, reaching the end of the prewritten material, you know the drill. I'm going to fill the time throwing out a finished story.

Thanks for reading! You're great.

* * *


	10. Another One Bites the Dust

**Another One Bites The Dust  
**

_Are you hangin' on the edge of your seat?_

* * *

_Precisely 7:25 pm, The Day, 1971. Suixi Laogai, Guangdong Province._

"Coffee's gone already," said Chou Bing-Weng, in the piss-yellow light of the guardhouse's sodium lamp. "Do we even have more coffee?"

The crowd of men at the tables gave an unintelligible mutter as they bent over their mahjong tiles. Bing-Weng sighed and opened the cupboards to mournfully tally their fast-depleting stock of crackers and oranges. He found a box of coffee beans and a crank grinder. "They could have given us a day's warning before sending you over; don't know how we're going to last tomorrow…"

"It's better than a hotel," said one of the newcomers.

"Don't tell me you asked to come here," said Bing-Weng as he hefted a kitchen knife, only half in jest.

* * *

Under the trees beside the prison, the_ Tonga_'s crew slumped and reclined and fidgeted from foot to foot. Captain Sparrow stamped around in tight figure-eights. The Colombians and Cambodians sat in a circle, polishing their machetes and speaking some pidgin of English, Spanish, and French, while a passel of ex-Marines and ex-sugarcane farmers swapped war stories. If they could be believed, the farmers had seen the most action.

Jules Norton, twenty-three years old and four years deserted from his American squad-mates since they came to Vietnam, was unwelcome among the Marines, and sat in a small circle with John Carpenter, a bankrupt distiller from Liberia; Zero Solaguren, a Biscayan college delinquent; Maxine and Paul, thugs from D.C.; Petey Becker, who had brought his acetylene cutter and had the mask slung backwards over his neck; and Zham Hiu, who had never done anyone wrong except by robbing them. Jules, Maxine, and Paul had been quietly trying to sing "Barbara Ann" for Hiu's benefit, and every twelfth note might hit a tolerable harmony.

It was Gung Ngau, watching the radio tower on the steep hill that loomed above the north-west of the prison, who saw the beacon atop the high steel frame wink out. He hissed for the others to join him at the edge of the woods, and they crept out of the dark and into the fading twilight. The exterior arc lamps hadn't turned on yet, so the prison walls cast a shadow over the overgrown lawn about its base.

A spike of pink flame burst on the dark side of the hill, and an instant later the crew heard the _shuff_ of a rocket. Something shrieked overhead, the men held their breath, and then from the prison's north wall, they heard a thunderclap, and the ground pulsed. The guards in the prison gun-towers yelled in panic.

"Form ranks!" the Captain barked, and the crew—twenty-six all told—shuffled into rough lines, as the Captain and the ex-Marines dragged stragglers into position.

From inside the prison, they heard more yells, panicked bellows, shouted conversations. On the hill where the shot had come, a spotlight flicked on in a far-off clearing, revealing two fearsome tanks, poised with their turrets toward the prison. Against the dim flank of the darkening hill, the spot of light seemed to float, disembodied, an indefinable distance. The shouting crescendoed, until at a nod from the Captain, Gung Ngau picked up his bullhorn and demanded the prison's surrender.

Hiu translated quietly for anyone near enough to listen, watching the Captain fidget. "We have you all outgunned," Gung Nau announced."We have tanks and snipers ready to destroy you at will if you do not cooperate. We are standing at the East side of the prison, you Communist imbeciles."

A line of men quickly materialized on the East wall, and Gung Ngau and Captain Sparrow led the crude column fully into the open.

"Shoulder arms," said the Captain quietly, and two dozen automatics and wooden dummies lifted toward the top of the wall. The guards ducked.

"You will open the prison door," Gung Ngau continued. "Cooperate, and you will all be spared, and you can get back to your jobs, less a single prisoner. Resist, and we will cut our way in and overpower you, and the interior and guard towers will be shelled. Any vehicles that leave the prison tonight will also be shelled. You have two minutes."

Jules counted seconds on his fingers. At seventy-eight, the heavy steel door swung open, revealing a single white-faced guard in an olive green policeman's jacket, the stark white glory-blaze of arc lamps, a yard paved in crooked bricks. The prison ward squatted within, a windowless steel-roofed block of concrete with ventilation slits high on the walls and a barred gate leading to its central hall. In the near corner of the walls was another squat steel-roofed building, likely the guardhouse. The prison was a box within a box.

The men who had false rifles swung them back to their shoulders and drew their sidearms; fearing an ambush, an advance guard of gunmen and ex-rebels crept through the doorway with their rifles probing ahead like whiskers.

"Clear," announced Gung Ngau. "Come through—all of you."

Clear, Jules realized with tightening lungs when he had crossed under the cold heavy threshold that whispered of portcullises and murder-holes, was not clean, or friendly, or safe. A large cluster of guards stood outside the guardhouse, dangling their gun-belts over their heads and passing them to the_ Tonga_ gunmen before filing indoors at rifle-point.

Hiu, Gung Ngau, Petey with his cutting torch, Captain Sparrow, and half the macheteros approached the jail itself, the Captain gripping one of the policemen by the elbow and grinning down into his face like a feral terrier at a rat.

The keys rattled in the guard's hand.

The gate swung open.

Hiu shouted for his grandmother, and the party disappeared from view.

* * *

"Well," said Maxine cheerily. Jules startled and gripped his M-16. "That went well."

Most of the_ Tonga_s now stood in three rough semicircles, guns facing out: one blocking the exterior door open, one facing the guardhouse door, blocking it closed, and the other standing at the prison ward's gate across the courtyard, peering into the dim hallway and listening to Hiu calling for his grandmother. Jules, Maxine, and Paul shared the exterior door with two squint-eyed Russian brothers on the run from their mob, watching the lamps swim in their eyes and the sky stain deeper and deeper blue. Dmitri the ex-MIG pilot was prowling the grounds, a gun in each hand, cigarette smoke puffing in the harsh lights as he breathed.

All was quiet in the guardhouse. Jules imagined the Chinese police inside whispering together, ripping wiring out of the walls to turn into flails, smashing the tables for clubs and shields, prying up floorboards to reveal a cache of Russian guns and shrapnel grenades. "There is no monster under the wardrobe," he whispered to himself.

"What?" asked Maxine. Her chunky Irish-German frame was awkwardly close to his throat. Her smile was friendly enough, but Jules could never help noticing her large yellowish teeth.

"Shakespeare," he muttered. He tromped forward to glance at the group at the guardhouse door, received a reassuring nod, and tromped back.

Dmitri disappeared around the back of the prison ward, and a gunshot echoed about the concrete canyon and down from the hills, catching itself on corners, twisting, turning, pealing like a bell.

Jules yelped. "Mitty!"

A birdsong-babble of Chinese muttered from behind the mass of the prison ward. The _Tonga_s stared from the guardhouse, still shut around the guards they had corralled inside, to the open courtyard where the sounds came. From around the ward's corners, pistols opened fire on the men who stood at the guardhouse door.

"Run!" they bellowed, and they sprinted for the outer gate, one man crying out and staggering to the ground.

"Stop! Stop!" snarled one of the Russians at the door.

"Get Mitty!" shouted Jules.

The guardhouse _Tonga_s slammed into the Russians, nearly bowling them all over, when the tallest of them, Stas, bear-hugged two Colombians and a Liberian, and roared, "Shoot the bitch dogs! Shoot them!" He unslung his automatic and sprayed half a clip past the corner of the prison that sat across from the guardhouse: a blare of muzzle-roar and the shriek of ricochets. They heard shouts of alarm from behind the building, then, distant, the crack of a rifle from the hill, and more shouts.

The_ Tonga_s readied their guns and faced the prison ward's corner.

"Let's hope the twins don't use the bazookas again while we're in here," said Maxine, and Jules glanced worriedly up at the hill where the false tanks watched. "Paulie, take Jules and go grab Mitty." She elbowed Paul, and he sneered at her reflexively. "Get. Go!"

On the hill, another rifle cracked, and Jules and Paul raced over the paving stones along the other side of the prison, rifles swinging heavily on their slings. Through the prison's window-slits, they heard Hiu and Gung Ngau shouting in Chinese, and the shrilling of panicked women, and then—pistol shots?

They scooted around the corner, and Paul tripped on something in olive nylon. A leg.

"F—!" Paul shouted, catching himself and staring down with wide eyes at Dmitri's bleeding form.

"F— yourself!" snapped Dmitri, without lifting his face from the stones.

Jules choked. "You're shot!"

"Drag me," Dmitri grunted.

"What?" said Paul, gaping down him, at the sluggish trail of red creeping out from under his old cropped flight-suit.

"My legs!" Dmitri snarled. "Drag me!"

Jules caught a glimpse of something at the prison ward's far corner: a head, no, five, five guards, pistols drawn. He jerked the trigger of his M-16 and sprayed the area, all his Corps weapons-training burned out from fear, the muzzle swinging wide and up of its own accord. The guards leapt away behind the bricks, and the clip was spent. He panted, bewildered.

Paul had rolled Mitty onto his back, drawing a bellow of pain that sang oddly in Jules' stinging ears. "Move him!" Paul grunted, and they laid hold of the sturdy nylon collar that was inside the flimsy blue uniform jacket, and dragged him, staggering and stumbling, backward over the courtyard.

"Door," mumbled Mitty, as they hurried for the exit, staring at the last corner of the ward and praying not to see the black squint eyes of pistols popping around it.

"Any second, any second," hissed Jules, more in prayer than logic. The gate and the rest of the raiding party were so far away.

"Door," said Mitty, lifting his chin from his chest. "The cell ward has back door. Guards!"

* * *

Poor Chou Bing-Weng. He may never taste coffee again.

You may have seen sodium lamps, the ghastly yellow monochrome bulbs, on the side of the freeway and in old tunnels. Hell uses sodium lamps for lighting when brimstone is not available; it adds to the atmosphere.

Thanks to A-Hard-Days-Night for the beta read!


	11. Welcome To The Jungle

**Welcome to the Jungle  
**

_ It's gonna bring you down! _

_One week and two hours before the present time. Vancouver, Canada_

"See," said Jules, with a mirthless chuckle, "We thought we had all the guards locked up. So we marched right on in. Cap and some of the head guys and the South Americans went to the prison to grab the old lady. The rest of us, we had to deal with what we thought we'd taken care of when Gung Ngau and his guys swept the place to begin with. My pal Dmitri got shot in the back, couldn't move his legs." His voice faltered. "That's why I skipped out of the marines in the first place, to avoid all that, y'know, like in the movies, 'I can't move my legs!' 'I can't find your f---in' legs!'"

He sighed and shifted against the bar, stretching his bad foot. "Yeah, that worked out just peachy."

* * *

_Around 7:45 pm, The Day, 1971. Suixi Laogai, Guangdong Province._

The lights in the prison were yellow.

Under that sullen fluttering glare, the colors of the world stripped off their belts and hung themselves resolutely by the bars; Mr. Roy G. Biv was stretched out on an unwashed steel table in the infirmary and a cocky orderly was forging the doctor's name on his death certificate before he called it a night. Yellow was white. The Red Party posters were gray. Blue and green were black. Skin was pasty, eyes were jaundiced, shadows spidered faintly at every angle from the bases of the bars. As Captain Sparrow scanned the sleek black heads that huddled in the cells as far from his crew as the walls would permit, he mused that walking in this light was rather like swimming through lemon dish-soap—or something else. The prison's odor was nothing like lemons.

"Tang hau!" came a reedy cry, the piercing call of Madam Zham, her voice hoarse and bruised. Hiu shouted "Po!" and dashed from the group to slam his hands against her gate. The rest of the crew followed, clapping each-other on the back and grinning.

Touching.

Jack stomped down the corridor, still peering sharply from cell to cell as his coat swung about his knees like an anxious dog. His weapons jostled in their sheathes and holsters; as he scanned the prisoners, his hands flapped on their own rhythm as though patting an endless row of heads in duck-duck-goose.

"Keys," called Gung Ngau from Hiu's side. His grandmother had taken hold of both his ears and was weeping and cursing, and Hiu was patting her gently with one hand and trying to loosen her fingers with the other. "Captain!" Gung Ngau called again. "Keys?"

Jack pivoted, and pitched the ring of keys in the general direction of his men; thankfully one of the macheteros caught it before it flew into a cell. As they bullied the shrinking guard they'd captured into sorting out the proper key for them, Jack paced to the end of the hallway and glared at a solid steel door that ended the path. He knew the jail was bigger than this.

"Mr. Becker!" he shouted, after examining the heavy riveted doorframe, the rust stains, and the incomprehensible characters in squat gray-red columns.

"Yeah, Cap?" called Petey, hefting his cutting torch. The rest of the crew were clustered around Madam Zham's cell, trying to sort the old woman to the front and shove away the madder, desperate, less gun-shy of her fellow prisoners before they opened the door.

Jack beckoned Petey with a few jerks of his head, and Petey hesitantly broke from the group and crossed the hall to join him. Sparrow grabbed him by the strap of his fuel tank and glanced over his shoulder at his crew.

"What's up?" asked Petey, looking back to smile as they finally extracted Madam Zham and she latched her shriveled arms around Hiu's torso, gunbelts and all.

"It's come to my attention," said Jack, tugging Petey away toward the steel door, "that something of an incommodious, incendiary, but nonetheless inexpungeably _vital_ nature might well be sulking on the other side of…that."

"You want me to burn some holes?" asked Petey, grinning.

"Yeh. Specially…there," Jack said, flicking his hand at three protruding hinges.

"Gotcha." Petey flipped his welding mask right-way-round, fired up the sharp blue flame, and leaned against the door, burning from the top hinge toward the bottom. The colored light jutted in glorious relief against the hazy glare of the sodium bulbs, like a keyhole to the real world. Gold-shining slag dribbled from the steel like wax, and white sparks flared like flash-powder. Jack squinted over Petey's shoulder, dancing from foot to foot.

"We got her!" called one of the crew outside Madam Zham's cell. "We're gettin' out! You comin'?"

"Aye!" Sparrow shouted, making Petey wince. "Mr. Becker and meself are slightly delayed, just slightly, hardly at all! Take your time, we've _not_ fallen behind."

"Watch it, Cap!" said Petey, and he stepped away from the door. He gave it a cautious kick, and the dribbles of cooling steel on the hinges made a ringing chinking sound, the door tilted, and slowly it leaned, pivoted on its deadbolt, and lurched from the doorjam with a savage clatter.

The moment it came to rest, Jack darted across into a room hung with gray banners and white lettering—probably red and gold—and tables with rows upon rows of beaded slippers, tiny beads in numbered trays, needles, reels of thread, patterns on wrinkled graph paper. Against the far wall huddled about two dozen small dark-haired women of all ages, squeezed into the corners like trapped mice. Jack flourished his Uzi, and approached another steel door on the opposite end of the room. "Sharply, Mr. Becker."

"That door, too?"

"Aye. Sharply!"

The hinges faced away from the room. For this door, Petey was forced to cut away a plate of steel over the bolt, then through the heavy tempered bolt itself. Jack fidgeted more frantically as Petey cut, and the prisoners crept along the wall until they were crowded against the opposite corners from him and his gun. Jack frowned. "If ever you thought to run for it," he announced in Cantonese, "now's the moment."

The women stared at him, eyes glinting. Not one moved for the open door.

"Terminal failure to imagine," Jack muttered. "Progress?"

"Mmn," grunted Petey, who had his tongue between his teeth as he worked. "There." He shoved the door, and it swung gravely open onto another hall of cells.

Jacketed forms shifted on the other end of the hall.

"Whoa!" Jack barked. He side-stepped the doorway as a half-dozen thunderclaps cracked through, then yanked the AK-47 he'd brought off of his shoulder. "Guns!" he hissed at Petey. "Guns!" He flapped the Uzi frantically, and Petey's mouth went 'o' and he drew a pistol in one awkward, meaty paw.

They shoved the three weapons blindly into the gap, and Petey jerked out two shots. There was a piercing screeow, a grunt, a woman's scream, and then a shout of retreat, rabble boot-steps stampeding away over the ringing floor, and the steely slam of a gate. Petey panted, drawing his gun back in to his chest and pressing himself to the concrete as he listened for movement. 

Jack charged past the door into the emptied hall, eyes darting three directions at once: left cells, right cells, the gate to the courtyard: black hair, black hair, no guns pointing through the bars yet. Petey edged into the doorway, eyes wide. Jack beckoned.

Petey flinched.

* * *

_Tang hau_ in Cantonese, and my grammar is nonexistent since I pulled these words straight out of an online dictionary, ought to mean something along the lines of "little monkey," or "darling brat." Madam Zham helped care for Hiu during his terrible two's. _Po_ means "Grandmother.

The room with the slippers and beading equipment is the "labor" part of "reformation through labor." People actually die in these places, from chronic lack of sleep, because some managers will keep them at their work until they fill their quota. Some prisons are funded by sales of their products, so the wardens essentially have a pack of "free" (as in "free printer paper!") slaves.

Once again, sincere thanks to A-Hard-Days-Night, for help in grammar, description, style, and cleaning up those embarrassing little misplaced referentials. She's great, folks!


	12. I Would Do Anything For Love

**I Would Do Anything For Love**

_(But I won't do **that.**)_

* * *

_Around 7:50 pm, The Day, 1971. Suixi Laogai, Guangdong Province._

Puffing and stumbling, Jules and Paul had managed to drag Mitty all the way back from the end of the cell ward to the main entrance. The fast-diminishing rescue party was bundling Hiu and Madam Zham out into the night to trek down the wooded hill to the ponies, Gung Ngau at the head.

Maxine huffed when she saw them arrive, watching the way Mitty's ankles flopped limp against the ground and the way his fists quivered as they held him by his arms. "Yuri, you wanna take him…" she tried, noticing Jules already shivering and shifting his weight from foot to foot in exhaustion.

The other big Russian spat on the paving stones in answer, and kept staring down the sight of his rifle at the corner of the ward. He shot at the outer wall, trying to bounce the bullet around; a ricochet and a yelp of surprise rewarded him, then angry shouts of guards. Probably missed.

"Men," Maxine muttered. "Zero, Philippe, help Paul take him down. _Andale_, _andale!_ Jules, shoot the bastards as soon as you see movement, the twins—"

A pink flame burst on the hillside, a rocket shrieked, and a blast shocked the walls, a noise so strong it rattled Jules' guts and left him gasping. He struggled to hang onto Mitty's elbow as Paul cursed beside him. Shrapnel bounded high overhead.

"The twins would hold their fire if they knew what the hell they're doing!" Maxine shrieked above the locust-hum that clung to their ears. A rifle cracked from the same spot, and the shot rang ineffectually off the overhanging eaves of the prison. The Chinese guards gave a shout, and a half-dozen pistols poked around the prison corner; the Russians sprayed the corner eagerly, and the guns withdrew.

Zero and Philippe grabbed Mitty's arm and legs, and scrambled wheelbarrow-style out the door, pausing just long enough for Zero to switch his loaded rifle for Jules' empty. "Why don't we go?" Jules demanded.

"Cap and Petey," grunted Maxine. "Whatever he's doing, it better be good."

Boots rang within the prison, a single set of running footsteps, and Petey sprinted out the gate, torch gone, eyes wild. He crossed the courtyard and would have charged past the dwindling party into the woods when Maxine grabbed him by the collar. "Where's Cap?" she demanded.

"Comin'," Petey gasped. "What the hell was that—that—"

"Twins bein' stupid," said Maxine. She released him and he gratefully bounded off.

Most of the rescue party had already left down the hill. Jules, Yuri, Maxine, and two Colombians stood in the main doorway, looking at each-other.

"So he's coming," said Jules, clutching his rifle. His voice cracked. "How many guards are there?"

* * *

_Seconds before._

Standing at the threshold to the deadly hallway, Petey watched Captain Sparrow's back twitch and bow like the deranged pendulum of one of Salvador Dali's squirming clocks. In the years he had worked with him, he had privately compared the Captain's gait to a drunk pigeon, a young colt, and a drag queen before metaphor failed him. Tonight, as Sparrow stalked with manic urgency down the hallway on his mysterious errand, veering closer and closer to the gate at the end where armed guards had just darted away through, he simply thought him a lunatic.

Cutting holes was supposed to be fun.

Sparrow whirled in the middle of the hall, those painted black eyes sparking in impatience. "Step to, Mr. Becker!" he snapped. Petey jumped and panicked, running a few steps forward. As he approached, he took a deep breath and unslung the mask and torch from around his neck, the little blue pilot flame still burning. Sparrow stared down his nose at the proffered gear as though in puzzlement, and made no move to take them.

"Uh," said Petey, giving the bundle of straps a jiggle.

"One would think," said Sparrow, leaning in with unconscious menace, "t'would be easier t'do your steel-cutting if you _wore_ that."

"Eh," said Petey, glancing over his Captain's shoulder at the gate, and a slit-eyed face with a small black handgun.

Sparrow sidestepped, plastered himself against the nearest cell, and sent a casual shot ringing down the hall. It pinged off the bars of the exit, but the guard flinched away.

Petey took a wavering step back, and Sparrow's eyes widened. "No, ye don't—" he started to shout, and then something exploded on the roof, punching it in like a fist in a plastic bag; the walls and the bars and the sheet metal growled with the aftershocks, and Petey dropped his equipment to the concrete floor and fled.

Jack recovered from the shock, ears ringing, just in time to see Petey's heels springing for the door. His pack-mule was gone.

Scowling in exasperation, he swept up the torch and mask and tripped the rest of the way up the hallway, scanning side-to-side: black hair, black hair, white hair with stringy waves in it, black hair, black—wait—

Bugger, that could not be Lizzie.

He halted and crept toward the bars of a small, private cell, face twisted in fascinated horror, hands cringing up toward his chest, as he stared at a crumpled figure in a ratty prison jumpsuit huddled against a far wall. Her hair was thin, unkempt, cobwebby; her collarbones jutted under crepe-paper skin; the fingers at her manacled wrists were streaked with veins, twisted, knobby. Her whole back seemed to have lost its spring, like a clipper with a sagging keel.

She was staring at him with one brown eye. The other, under a flimsy fall of hair, was a sunken hollow.

"Jack," she whispered, as though in disbelief.

Jack winced. Even her voice had gone frail and reedy.

She blinked her rheumy eye and cautiously shook her head. "Jack Sparrow!" she hissed. "Get me out!"

Jack jumped and recovered. At least I don't _love_ her, he had been thinking. If it were love, I'd give it up like I'd been dunked off an iceberg and run right back out the hall, maybe dashing one of those pretty young prisoners to freedom and adventure… No, this must be entirely pragmatic, for proper logical cold money-grubbing piratey reasons. What were those, again?

He glanced out at the hall gate, slipped the welding mask onto the side of his head, and tried to watch the stabbing flame lick the bars into golden flux through the tiny rectangular window as he kept his other eye, and his other hand with the Uzi in it, watching the exit.

Two cuts and some furious yanking to break away the stray metal, and the door swung open. He darted inside, finally out of range of the guards' guns. Guards loose, with guns, were a very bad and unexpected development.

Lizzie, with a shaking, wizened claw, held up the chains that led from her wrists to an eye hook bolted to the wall by a steel plate; the wall behind the bolts was scraped an inch into the concrete, and the eye ring was thinned from the inside, the mark of years of monotonous sawing with the links. Jack crouched and minced forward, then paused, eyes running up and down her with his mouth twisted in a way that brought an affronted scowl to Lizzie's face. Should he come closer? Was it catching?

"Jack," said Lizzie, trying to be stern and sensible, and ending up sounding like one of those toothless oracles who cast human finger-bones in crypts, "It's been twenty years. I'm old. You _have_ seen old women before me."

"All pleas to the contrary, love, our line of work is, properly, a merry life but a short one, seeing that a gimp in the leg is enough to get one clubbed or shot, years before actual senescence shows its grizzled roots. Try a little understanding, Lizzie—"

"Jack," she cut in quietly, "Get me out."

"Ah-ah-ah," said Jack, leaning back and shaking a finger. "I've still to rejoin my crew and rendezvous the ship, and you're not looking t'be much convenience for me. The pack of guards sniffing about has put quite a few snarls in the grand plan."

"Jack, I can walk," said Lizzie. "Please cut me loose."

Jack squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and stared out at the open door, trying to think. There was no time. "You'll owe me, aye?" he asked ineffectually.

"Of course, Jack. Cut me loose."

He stretched the chain tight with one hand and burned it through until the links gave way, swinging hot and glowing over the floor. He set down the torch and used a knife to flick away the molten bits.

As he sheathed the knife, Lizzie lunged forward and wrapped her jingling arms around his chest. Jack toppled back with a yelp.

Ugh! He thought, at first. She looks like the Curse and smells like prison.

Bugger all, he thought an instant later, bringing a gentle hand to the back of her neck. Her brains got scrambled; her feminine thirsts are rampaging unchecked. She'll make you regret this if she lives.

Then he scuffled back, shoving her roughly away, eyes wide: this is _Lizzie_ hugging you, you daft swab, naught good will come of this.

When he stood out of arm's reach, heart racing and a suspicious snarl on his lips, he looked down into the barrel of his own gun. She narrowed her eye at him and lowered the muzzle toward his knee.

"Get me out, Jack," she said, again. "You carry me, or I carry you."

Jack smiled tightly and tried to sidle around to grab the gun, which tracked him steadily. "Lizzie. Darling. You said you could walk."

Even with that ruin of a face, she managed to look loftily incredulous. "Do I look like I could walk far?"

* * *

_Andale, andale!_ "Hurry, hurry!" Does it ring a bell? Is it Spanish? I heard it somewhere...

Proverbially, piracy is "a short life, but a merry one."

And OMG, Sparrabeth?? More like OMG shootings!!

Again, thanks to A-Hard-Days-Night for excellent beta work.


	13. Ballroom Blitz

**Ballroom Blitz**_  
_

_It was like lighting! Everybody was frightening! _

* * *

_One week and two hours before the present time. Vancouver, Canada_

"It turned out there were maybe one, two dozen guards running around with service pistols, using the prison ward for cover and trying to work up the nerve to shoot us," Jules explained. "Most of us had left for the river, so it was just the five of us covering Cap's way out—me, Yuri, Pablo, Sticks, Max."

"A good soldier never leaves a man behind?" quoted a young listener. He could have been in college, with his moth-eaten Styx T-shirt and the four-day stubble on his chin, but for the haunted look, the nervous twitching and peering over his shoulders. He did not belong at Jules' Hole, but neither did most of the day's customers. It had been an unusual week for the bar.

Jules smiled to himself and shook his head. "Nah. I mean, we liked Captain fine—he could be a pain, but by God the man could throw a party—but it was him or us out there, and if it'd been anyone else, we probably would have done the logical thing and given him up for dead. But he was the only one who could get the plane off the water when it got choppy—we couldn't do that, we'd be out of business. We staked out the door for a while, then we figured if he could make it out on his own, he'd be out already."

* * *

_Around 8:00 pm, The Day, 1971. Suixi Laogai, Guangdong Province._

"Geez, boys make everything so complicated," snapped Maxine, her near-empty rifle swinging idly with her words. "_I_ can't carry him. If just one of you goes in, you'll have to drag the Cap and it'll take twice as long. Suck it up and play!"

Jules looked up at Yuri, who was scowling at him. Sticks and Pablo had faced off, still eyeing the corners of the prison nervously. Yuri lifted a fist and the other men mimicked him, shaking it up, down, up, down, _open_. Paper beat rock. Scissors beat paper.

Jules felt the blood drain out of his face. "Hell, no!"

"Hell, yeah,_ chico_, you don't hear me complain," snapped Sticks, who had also lost.

"Puppy, get your ass in there," Maxine groaned. They were all staring at Jules now, forcing him to the front, into the courtyard and out of the doorway, into the glaring arc lights.

"They'll be all over," Jules protested. "Can't see a thing out here—they come in through the back way, hide out in the ward. And I, I, I, I—"

"You, you, you, you," mocked Maxine.

"I can't carry him!" Jules gasped, desperate. "Yuri—" He turned to the taller man. "You could sling him over your back like a rug—"

Yuri sneered and shoved him casually, so powerful Jules staggered and had to pick himself off the concrete. "Get in there, before I shoot you like the coward swine you are."

In the courtyard, steel glinted under the arc lamps, startling them with the crack of a shot. Jules yelped. A bullet had bounced off the cobblestones, spraying his shin with pebbles and shrapnel. It had come from the wrong side of the prison.

Maxine shrieked a curse and the party swung up their guns to this new point of attack, driving back five men with pistols and plugging one, only to leave themselves open for a volley from the other side of the prison. The guards had flanked them. Jules dove for the protection of the gateway, Yuri grunting in pain behind him.

"Wasn't too bad," said Maxine absurdly. "Showed them." Her eyes were wide, her irises two solid discs of brown, and she swallowed convulsively. She pressed her stomach with fast-reddening fists.

Yuri had braced himself against the wall of the doorway, on guard. Sticks and Pablo shoved Jules up to the front and wrestled his sweaty hands and his rifle into some approximation of readiness.

Jules wanted to run into the woods and curl up under a log.

From behind each corner of the prison, the guards were shouting. The five_ Tonga_s flinched at the noise, as the guards' calls gained force and rhythm, building into a chant, a song. The men tightened their grip on their guns—automatics or not, the enemy had the advantage of numbers, and if they struck simultaneously, the guards could pin them. Jules had the sickening feeling that when their hymn hit the chorus, the whole horde would charge onto the field of fire at once. Maxine slumped against the wall, wearing a perverse dazed smile and a snake of blood worming down her leg.

The gate of the ward flew open and a tall shape staggered into the lights, lurching for the exit as fast as its overburdened legs would take it.

Jules yanked his trigger in surprise, spraying high over the courtyard.

It was Captain Sparrow, the bottom half of the lumbering shape; an emaciated old woman was half clinging, half chained to his back. He had her leg in one arm and an AK-47 in the other; she waved his precious Uzi high overhead.

Captain Sparrow was alive.

Jules' gunshots echoed.

The guards broke their singing and began to shout over the prison ward at each-other, then, as the Captain and his passenger spun around, guns leveling, they gave a bellow and launched themselves into the open.

* * *

_One week and two hours before the present day, Vancouver._

"A real shoot-out, huh?" asked the woman in the flannel shirt. She lifted her hands to make air quotes. "You the 'sole survivor?'"

Jules sighed and hung his head. "Look," he grunted. "You guys all know what you're talking about, you've been around, I'm not gonna lie to you. I was dumb, I was scared. I just wanted to get out of there. If I could, I woulda just hit the floor and run out into the woods."

"But?" asked the young man who was not a college student.

"But we all just panicked and started shooting people."

* * *

_Around 8:00 pm, The Day, 1971. Suixi Laogai, Guangdong Province._

Jules wasted half his clip on two men before he remembered to switch his gun to semi-automatic fire. He forced his head down to sight on a tall charging guard's throat; the man dropped before he could switch targets, and Jules' shot bounced off the wall behind him. Captain Sparrow had shot the man's right shoulder.

Bullets roared.

The guards were too far from shelter to retreat, too committed to let the_ Tonga_s escape. The men at the door plugged away at the shifting mass, but it was the Captain and the woman who did the damage.

Sparrow could shoot a seagull out of the sky.

Hampered though he was by the woman on his back, he swung the AK, firing and switching targets almost before he paused to aim, shooting for the shoulders. The woman shot, too, the Uzi shaking in her frail wrist, but her movements quick and deliberate. A man dropped, felled by Pablo with a gut wound—he knelt on the pavement, pistol forgotten, hands pawing at his belly. She put a bullet in his head.

Captain Sparrow staggered as he shot, but kept his balance, still backing as quickly as he could for the door. Yuri spent his last round, grabbed his rifle by its hot barrel, and flung it dead into a man's face just as Sparrow and his burden slipped past into the doorway. The seven of them practically fell out the main gate, Sticks and Pablo covering their escape, Jules clutching Maxine by the waist. Yuri slammed the door and braced himself against it, panting in the blackness.

A second later, a grenade from the Twins burst inside the prison, and the company cringed. The guards had stopped shouting.

"Take 'er!" Sparrow barked when the echoes died, trying to buck the old woman off his back. With a rattle of chains, she peeled off and sank painfully to the earth, long bony limbs folded like a dead spider. She handed him his gun, which he stuffed furiously into his holster. "Mr. Dubnikov. Haul up this…bloodsucking, snake-hearted harpy—and move out! Back to the barge!"

* * *

Leaving the prison behind, the stragglers trudged through the forest, down the curve of the hill, the Captain making a bird call every few minutes until they were finally answered by Gung Ngau, and they rejoined the rest of the crew. Jules had rushed into their midst, desperate as a boy scout seeing camp after a week's starvation on a bear-haunted mountain. The minutes in the prison had felt like hours, and now they were already burning out of his memory, leaving only the vivid incidents, the fear, the shame, the shaking. His legs were weak.

Dmitri managed a grunt when Jules found him, strapped hand and foot to the back of one of the ponies.

The two elderly prisoners shared a second pony, their combined weight less than the Captain himself, and Maxine, groaning, lay on her stomach, bound to the third animal. Two of the crew walked with her, watching to keep her from slipping. The strange old woman was trying to unbend her shoulders and seat herself properly on her little mount's bare back, hissing when it jostled her, blinking wearily, and twisting her head so her single eye could peer from side to side in the starlit woods. Some men watched their footing by the light of their cigarettes.

They reached the river just as the night began to lighten.

The Twins, the Irish boys who had manned the tanks, met them at the bank and had their borrowed barge's engine idling. The crew stripped off their hastily made blue shirts, bundled the former prisoners in stolen laundry, and pushed off downstream to _Tonga Mars_ and blessed, blessed home.

* * *

Captain Jack Sparrow is nobody's horse!

Thanks to A-Hard-Days-Night for the beta read! Saved you all a lot of confusion, so you should thank her, too.


	14. Mrs Murphy's Chowder

I'm back! After flipping out and vanishing for a month. My profile has the excuses. And I'm starting this off with a big apology to my kind, clever, generous reviewers who haven't received any replies for a month. So to make up for it, I'm plugging them massively, and you'd better believe I'm sincere about it.

East Coastie1500 has been so very supportive for ages and ages, and I still haven't reviewed the latest chapter of Pavlov's Theories of Conditioned Reflex, a Norrington-centered AU with naval intrigue and British stoicism at their finest.

Arquenniel, I owe for her very long, very gracious review of my accursed one-shot which I swore to reply to in poetry. She is brilliant. Go read everything she wrote.

Nytd went and slammed out a review for every single frickin' chapter of my Will Turner story. That's 19 reviews, and she started after the whole thing was published. I freaked out and was hamstrung with gratitude, Nytd. Go read Naught But A Humble Pirate, a Hector Barbossa back-story with heart, wit, and teeth.

Erinya is also my hero, but her review was anonymous, so hah.

KMvancouver writes subtly off-the-wall modern Willabeth comedy that reminds me of a great Ben Stiller movie. Thanks, K! I'll reply some day!

Anyway, on with the show.

* * *

**Mrs. Murphy's Chowder **

_Every spoonful made you yodel louder._

* * *

_1971, the morning after The Day. __A river mouth near Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province, People's Republic of China._

Elizabeth was the last on the dock, hunching over a post and gazing at him with that inscrutable soulless appraisal that she had perfected while captaining a xebec sometime between Batavia in 1789 and Gibraltar in 1818. The effect from her sunken eye was withering. As if any woman needed more in her arsenal of pernicious glares.

Jack was in the launch with the last of the crew, a few of the Cambodians who had missed the worst of the action and had hung back that morning to buy souvenirs and fried fish in the nearby village. He held the rope in one hand and the launch's throttle in the other, his back to the hoggish black bulk of _Tonga Mars_ slouching on one wing-float out on the river mouth. He glared back at Elizabeth, stiff with fury.

A good man? A good man! Maybe! If Jack Sparrow is a good man, he's not like to leave you in the clink after risking his life, his men, his reputation, and his captaincy to drag your sorry bones out, now is he? Yes, of course Jack Sparrow is a good man when you're holding a pistol—his own pistol—to his head! Hector Barbossa would be a good man then, you treacherous conniving hypocritical minx. Such a honeyed tongue on you, aye? 'Oh, Jack, of course I'll repay you.' 'Jack, look after my son for me, and keep your slimy paws off my ship.' 'Oh, it must have been terrible for you in the locker! You know it was the only way!' Like hell it was!

Bugger, had he just been shouting that in front of the crew?

The Cambodians were staring at him, but it was a 'when are you going to throw the rope off and ditch the old bag so we can get back to the ship' sort of stare, not the 'on my signal, tie him down and get him a sedative' stare.

"Thank-you, Mr. Sparrow," Jack muttered to a hallucination standing beside him, who was panting after his rant and starting to foam at the mouth. So that was where his voice had come from.

"Captain Sparrow," said the ex-Pirate King. Or perhaps current Pirate King, like for American presidents, who retained the rights to their title long after they turned irrelevant.

"Yes. Captain. Swann," Jack spat.

"If we might discuss my payment in privacy," she said, nodding toward the Tonga.

Jack glared at her, nostrils flaring. Such a proud wench. Delusional governor's brat, barking at pirates and customs-men alike with nought but a knife on her willowy person, driving ships until their stays snapped under the weather, cajoling whole fleets into certain carnage, getting her husband killed. No, she'd never stoop, would she? Never say, 'please, help me, Jack,' not even when her hands are all twisted like bracken roots and her legs barely hold her and she's starved light as a feather. Perverse, idiot woman.

Just how old was she? She must have been spry enough twenty years ago, terrorizing the China Sea as Zhu Hong, but looking at her, after the prison, she could be eighty. She was unlikely to see two more summers.

Jack blinked and sniffed. "Very well, get in."

She tottered to the dock edge and half-stepped, half-rolled into the boat. The crewmen caught her before she could crack her head on the gunwale. Jack had made no move to help her, and she had made none to ask.

He pounded the throttle with extra venom, but relented when a sharp bounce drew a gasp of pain from Elizabeth.

The hole in the side of his leg had tried to rip itself apart on that jolt, too.

* * *

Tonga Mars hulked over the water, a sooty chimera of broad airy wings on a frigate's sea-running hull. She was tall as a ship, vertical as a ship, with a plane's incongruous tail sloping up and a plane's round blunt nose; she slouched on one massive float on her starboard wing, the other canting carelessly up at a far-off cloud. It was beneath the starboard wing that her bay doors opened, and here Captain Sparrow ploughed the launch to a stop, washing their wake and knocking their bow against the plane's skin. The black paint scarred shining aluminum where the boats had struck it before, making a haze of white scratches all around the doors.

They clambered into the open bay, hoisted Elizabeth up, hooked pulleys to the launch and hoisted it inside, slammed the sliding doors, and bathed in the dim mildewed darkness dotted by portholes and bare bulbs.

A real ship, Jack mused, was all bones and skin and sinews—simple, honest, and effective. The Tonga was like the inside of a whale, rib-girders running down the bulkheads, a ceiling knotted with pipes stuffed with oily juices, valves, hisses, and gurgles. It didn't feel healthy. The one redeeming thing about the whole affair was that it could jump peninsulas.

In the Tonga's abdominal region, in a big echoing cubical pen like the other big echoing cubical pens that composed the lower deck, the men had slung hammocks and built their home: a hybrid of army barracks and frat house, with the slightest dash of forecastle. The injured were pillowed on blankets on the floor. Yuri was sitting up, massaging a bloody yellow sweatshirt bound around his thigh and sharing a fuming mug of clear spirits with Collins, the first man to fall to the guards. Dmitri lay flat on his back, hands folded over his chest, legs flopped haphazardly over the floor. His ankles were limp and his eyes were squeezed shut in concentration; his lips moved as if in a chant. He grunted as Sparrow and the Cambodians clomped in, but did nothing more. Maxine, gut-shot, was curled on her side, sweating and shivering. Drool pooled under her bared teeth.

Other Tongas filled the room, crouching on the floor and leaning on their hammocks. The mood was bitter. Gung Ngau kept his eyes to the ceiling, but other men looked from the Captain to his old woman and back, scowling. Jack glared back, ignoring Elizabeth, and glanced down at the wounded. "You'll be wanting the tonic, aye?"

Yuri shuddered and nodded.

"You?" Jack asked, pointing at Jules, who had bandaged his shin, but seemed to have no trouble standing on it. "Care to brave the scoriac unguents of Mary Ulubambe?"

Jules shook his head. "Pass," he muttered.

The Captain swished to the pantry, his stride even more erratic to hide a limp from the ragged bullet-score in his thigh.

A half-hour later, he reemerged, walking in a somewhat straighter line, bearing a forty-ounce bottle of mahogany sludge and a peculiar tense grin. The crew withdrew from his path, opening a cringing gauntlet to the patients, and stared at Yuri and Collins with desperate sympathy. The Captain shook the big bottle until it foamed, and poured a full tot into Yuri's tin mug. Yuri steeled himself, cocking his head back and forth as though a different angle would make the mixture less gut-ripping, and finally plugged his nose and tipped back a mouthful. He choked, panted open-mouthed, and stared down at the cup, which was still nearly full. The Captain topped it off, and the big Russian gave him a pleading look that no one could recall seeing on his face before.

"Drink up," admonished the Captain, wagging a finger at him. Yuri nodded and forced himself to obey.

The Tonic was an abomination to science and physiology.

Its formula was one of the Captain's many guarded secrets—he claimed to have gotten the recipe from a healer on the Ivory Coast, but they doubted a traditional medicine-woman could concoct such a thing. Pepper, hot crushed red pepper, was a major ingredient. Another was a hundred-year-old egg, which they could get in Japan, but if none could be bought, a rotten one would do. The base was sea-water, they theorized, with extra salt thrown in, and soda powder on top of that. A second, raw, egg emulsified some sort of oil that reeked of gasoline into the mix—could it be gasoline?—and on top of it all, the men with sensitive noses swore, was a liberal splash of pure acetone.

This fiery cocktail purportedly hid an infusion of mystical African herbs. Though the pepper seared their throats and the solvents bore the burn all through the bloodstream, though the fumes made the brain turn to Jello, the egg reeked of sulfur, and the salt desiccated them from within, the Tonic worked. Yuri and Collins, choking down their mugs, were contemplating death, but the Tonic had never yet killed anyone. Mugs were fetched for Dmitri and Maxine, and their mates hauled them upright and forced the stuff past their lips, Maxine needing her throat stroked before she would swallow, her teeth clamped tight shut with pain and fever.

Yuri slammed his empty mug to the steel floor, gasping, eyes wide and streaming. The burn had begun to spread, and his hands shook.

"Give 'em the rest at sundown," the Captain announced, and Yuri, jaws gaping, slammed his fist down and gave an animal growl. Sparrow cringed and danced backward. "I leave you to it!"

* * *

With the injured stabilized, Jack told the crew to strap their things down, rounded up his flight engineer, and seated himself alone in the two-man cockpit. Gauges and switches and levers glared up at him, and he wondered how many of them actually did or said what the little black-and-white labels said they did.

Duplicitous bird. Oh, for spars and ropes and canvas that the eye could sweep at an instant, and trim and balance at will…perhaps a nuclear war would knock the world back a century or two. Wasn't unlikely.

He surveyed the water between the struts of the canopy, leaning to see over the plane's flanks, and gunned the throttles with a sigh. _Tonga_ sputtered awake, a great gale pluming behind her as she dragged herself over the water, gradually speeding and rising until, with a drunken tilt, she clambered onto a plane, cutting walls of spray, and at last she broke from the sea as though popping her lips from a hickey.

Zhangzhiang sunk at last behind the Southern horizon.

* * *

Yes, the Tonic is probably poisonous. A fist-full of pepper and a spoonful of industrial chemicals keeps the pirates deathly afraid of the medicine.

'Scoriac' is a word invented by Edgar Alan Poe to describe lava floes. Poe was fun that way.

_Tonga Mars_ is a fictional plane, but the JRM _Mars_ series of giant sea-going transport planes produced toward the close of WWII is real. Only six were built. Four were variously burned, wrecked, and destroyed by winds, and the last two, _Philippine _and_ Hawaii Mars_, now work as water-bombers to fight isolated fires in Canada. A _Mars_ can hold seven jeeps or hundreds of troops, and can fly from California to Hawaii and back on a single enormous fill-up of high-octane gasoline.


	15. Crossfire

**Crossfire**

_Whatever happened to the Golden Rule?_

* * *

_1971, the afternoon after The Day, a secluded inlet outside Vladivostok, USSR._

Planes need fuel.

Tonga Mars needed a lot of fuel, thousands of gallons of high-octane gasoline, discretely or deceptively acquired. They often bought this fuel from an underpaid _Podpolkovnik_ of a Soviet air force depot in Vladivostok, handing him a couple of gold bars and a case of cigarettes as they'd hook up an endless snake of intake hose to the tanker truck he'd sneak down to the beach.

The nice thing about doing business with the Soviet Union was that it didn't take much money to hush up half a military base.

Tonga Mars splashed down that afternoon onto a choppy sea, the hull slipping sideways in the ruts between the waves, the wings booming and wobbling as the floats bounced off high white crests. The plane's mechanic, a far more experienced and choleric machinist than Petey Becker, stood over Jack's shoulder during the landing, eyes slitted, crabbed hands white with tension, mouthing an unprintable mantra of nervous venom as the Captain plied the bulky plane along its death-dance, waltzing the round old matron to the tune of storm and wave, easing her slow feet down the safe road through the chaos to finally wallow, nose to windward like a weather-cock, on the gray bay.

Jack scanned the beach for a signal and caught sight of a pair of white thermal leggings fluttering from a sapling. The waves were far too high to send a launch out, let alone string four hundred feet of fuel hose across. Poor Comrade Malkov would have to wait for the pre-dawn calm to get his cigarettes.

He sidled around old Mr. Durham, who was still giving him his anxious she-bear glare, and slid down the rails of the ladder to the lower deck. "Lower anchor, Mr. Zapatero," he barked to the nearest crewman, who gave him a squinting side-long look, but obeyed.

Jack hated that look. It always ended with somebody looking for a new ship.

He picked his way through the mess and the berths to the pantry in the tail to snag some vodka and molasses for company until the seas flattened out. When he returned to the foot of the ladder, there was a withered white-haired murderess sitting on it.

"Ah," he said, the bottles clinking together. "I'd almost forgotten about you."

"Odd, considering you were the one to discover me," she remarked.

Jack did not reply, but busied himself with his bottles, un-capping them and glopping some molasses into the vodka. He capped that and shook it until into smoky amber, and took a swig.

"What is _that?_" Lizzie demanded.

Jack stared at her, annoyed, as though he'd forgotten she was there. "Not rum." He drew his gun and waved it under her nose.

She followed the muzzle with her eye, but declined to flinch backward or smile apologetically. "What is that for?"

"Insurance," said Jack. "Now as to the matter of your payment. Seeing as in your advanced decrepitude you'd be hard pressed to hobble twelve feet up to the bridge, let alone, it would seem, down a hallway with freedom at your front and the irons of Hell behind, it's the locker for you and I." He unlatched the rounded steel door that led to the chain locker in the nose, an upward-sloping cone of a room whose floor was a tangle of anchor chain and cigarette butts. At the room's peak, under the cockpit, was the nose hatch. The walls were ribbed upward, sideways, and at every angle with steel struts.

He bowed and doffed his hat to her, and she hauled herself to her feet with both hands and crept in to perch awkwardly on a narrow strut at bench height. He followed and shut them in. "Now," he said with a ghastly parody of a grin, "About the payment."

Lizzie pointed to the gun. "That's not necessary, Jack."

"On the contrary, among back-stabbing pirates such as ourselves, duress is the last prickly spiky brimstone-smoking bastion of uncivilized 'decency.' It's buffalo or be gored."

"I do have some space in my black heart for human gratitude," she sneered, but Jack cut her off.

"What," he snarled, taut with unaccustomed anger, "have you to be grateful for, _Chief Swann?_ You were a bloody snafu in a week of bloody snafus! My crew had the mad whim to go spring their old Chinese grandmother, having caught the fever for her dumplings. I, suffering the hydrophobia at the time, took the penny tour and melted down three doors and a chain at the risk of death by nine-millimeter, only to find, to me confoundment in me adled state, 'twas no darling grandmum in those shackles, and proceeded to hobby-horse right through a gunfight at the point of me own pistol. So you see, thanks to your inimitable sense of tact, I did nothing at all, and you've no debt to me. Parlay's concluded."

She lowered her eyes to her lap, fingers working. Her wedding band was gone. "On the contrary. From the first, you have always done right by me." Her eye narrowed at him. "Excepting the_Toledo_."

"Oh, aye," said Jack, loosening. "_Toledo_. Smart rig. Pity about the lines, though, not much to be done about that—"

"You blasted her to the bottom!" Lizzie hissed, incredulous. "She has no lines; she's a blackened hulk!"

"Hence the pity. Those straights couldn't block themselves, savvy, and_ Toledo_ was more than ample to the task."

She puffed like a snake, mouth struggling for words. "Jack Sparrow, you will never touch my ships, ever again."

"What makes you think you could stop me touching your ships?" he asked with a lascivious grin. "Ships like me. They, dare I put it, _long_ for me."

She had no response but an eye-roll. They stopped, listening to the sounds of the ship in the gale: only the crash of waves, strangely soft without the crack of canvas or the sigh and murmur of ropes for accompaniment._ Tonga_'s sleek skin made not a whistle in the wind.

"I want to make it up to you," said Lizzie, after a while.

"Now that'd be a sight, seeing as you've naught but a prison suit and a pair of manacles, and your other commodities long gone, while I have a ship and a crew. Lizzie, I very much doubt you can."

"Then might I ask another favor?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Spendthrift."

She shut her eyes, brushed a hand to her forehead, and forced out the words. "Where—how did you get that sword?"

"Sword," said Jack, tilting backwards. "What, this one?" he asked, pulling his coat back from the hilt of his saber.

"Not now," she snapped.

He stuffed his gun back into his belt, drew the slim, ancient blade, and rested it lightly on his fingertips. "This sword. Early Will Turner original. Forged for our mutual acquaintance the ex-Commodore, served him rather poorly through no fault of its own, served your most devoted husband satisfact'rily 'til I took it off him. Perfectly balanced, until it got sharpened a bit."

She clenched her fists, staring and staring.

"Last words Young William ever said to me," he continued, gaze wandering to a sliver of pewter light in the peak of the_ Tonga_'s nose, "were…les'see…" He looked her in the eye and summoned his peculiar impression of earnest nobility. "'The _moment_ you get done with that moronic costume party'—can't quite recall if he said 'moronic,' maybe it was 'barmy'—"

"Costume party?" Elizabeth exclaimed, switching from terrified to infuriated.

"At Hugh Heffner's," said Jack with a grin.

"Who?"

"'E says, 'bring that sword right back, and if you steal from me again, I'll beat it out of you the next time I see you, with interest.' Or something to that effect. So you see why I haven't spoken to the Whelp in ten years." He sheathed the sword.

"Good God, Jack," she groaned, with a ragged breath. "You put me on—"

"Aye, t'was a good hunch your dear husband had met an avoidable death by a violated sense of trust." He kept the grin, but all the light had dropped out of his eyes. "Such an honest man, Young William. To tell the truth, I'd expected you to give me the news on him, and not you beg the news off me. Bored, were we?"

She lunged for him, the movement halting before she could leave her seat, but the snarl plain on her white face. "You know nothing of me," she spat.

Jack kept up a stony calm, betrayed only by a whiteness at his nose, a twitching of his lips. "Evidently."

Her mouth worked noiselessly for a reply, like a shrew champing its venom. "I am surprised to see you here, Jack," she said at last, head twisting sideways from bottling herself in. She patted the plane's skin with a shaking claw. "Like old times. Beats the old _Pearl_ all 'round, does it?"

Jack fell against the jutting steel frame as though swatted there, jaw slack, clutching a slim gasp of mildewed air. His arms dropped to his sides. His hat—the eighth, crafted by his own hands—tumbled down his face and onto the floor.

"Lizzie," he breathed, "get off my ship."

* * *

A _Podpolkovnik,_ if Wikipedia is any indication, was a Soviet lieutenant colonel.

In my experience, when people under emotional stress talk to each-other, they don't communicate on a normal, logical, respectful human-to-human basis. Instead, they try to intimidate the other guy, or make pitiful puppy eyes at him, or try to shove his nose in his mess.


	16. Tell It Out

**Tell It Out **

_Now living, or dead? Tell!_

* * *

_One week and two hours before the present time, Vancouver. _

"The moment we could open the bay doors without shipping a wave," said Jules, "Captain had us sling a launch out and Zero drove her off to shore. And that was the end of that little adventure. I picked the bits of bullet and concrete out of my shin, wrapped it up in an old sweatshirt. The whole thing blew up anyway, like a raw sausage, never healed quite right. And that's how I hurt my leg."

"So," rumbled the lumberjack in gruesome amusement, "did the stuff work? The tonic?"

Jules shook his head and smiled wryly to himself, before looking back at the audience. "You know what they say about sugar pills, cures all ills, power of positive thinking, that kind of thing. Well, times that by feeling like you chugged napalm, and your brain's going to pull all kinds of voodoo crap to make, oh, two hours of hell, worthwhile. We swore by it. As long as the problem was worse than the cure."

The audience stared at him as he polished his last glass and started shoving them, rim-down, into the cabinet under the bar. He clinked around, bent sharp over at the waist, his old leather belt slipping up out of the worn-out loops of his patched jeans, a blotchy crescent of pale skin showing as his shirt slid toward his arm-pits. Glancing up like a marmot from its hole, he noticed all eyes were still on him, and pressed his lips together.

"What?"

The short-haired woman drummed her fingers over the bar. "That's it?"

Jules huffed and straightened, pressing himself up with his hands on his thighs. "That's never _it_. We didn't just all die the next day, you know, life goes on."

"But what about that Russian dude, your friend? And the weird old lady with the dumplings?"

"Well, there were two weird old ladies," said Jules, managing not to add an 'if you were paying attention,' "and only one made dumplings. The other one shot people in the head and pissed off the Captain." He picked up his towel and wrung it over in his hands, to have something to do. "The nice grandma with the dumplings ended up in San Fran with Hiu." He paused, bent his head, and stared at the holes that pitted the wall around the dart board. "The others…well. Mitty got shot in the back. In his spine. Positive thinking won't do squat for that. And after Captain kicked the crazy lady off, that was it for her. March in Russia, not even a raincoat on her."

He stretched the rag in his hands and with a tight smile, gave the bar surface a stiff, fervent scrub. When he looked back up, his hooded eyes scanned his patrons almost slyly. "What do _you_ think happened?"

* * *

_1971, the evening after The Day, a secluded inlet outside Vladivostok, USSR. _

They were readying the launch to send Elizabeth ashore.

Zero and Petey hooked the little ceiling-mounted davit up to one of the dozen aluminum boats that rested on Petey's welded storage racks, hoisted it into the air with a bit of puffing over the hand crank, and swung it out over the water and into the cold and wind. Spray and rain blasted through the bay doors. The sea undulated just beyond the threshold, great writhing wrinkles rushing past.

Lizzie was clinging to the wall with both hands, trying to see through the steel. Zero, with impeccable manners that not even a decade of delinquency and piracy had managed to stamp out, bowed at the waist and extended a hand to his passenger. When she gave no response, he straightened, shook her by the shoulder, and shouted in her ear. She gently brushed his hand away, nodded to him, and let him help her into the swinging boat.

In the far corner of the boat room, elbow braced against one of the racks, Jack Sparrow watched, very still.

He had already marched through half his molasses vodka, which had blurred the world into a wavery, melodramatic haze, and he had begun to forget what he was watching for. Lizzie, burying her head in her hands and sinking to the deck in tears of righteous regret? Lizzie pulling a Browning out of her trouser leg and spinning it on the nearest of the crew? Lizzie turning the poet, extolling William's love for her in all its improbable glory in the hopes of wheedling out some measure of mercy? Perhaps a simple 'Jack, I am about to die; please tide me over another ten years?'

But no, she had been staring at and clinging to the wall.

Proud, stupid devil's dam.

She let them load her into the launch, huddled on the bench as they lowered it onto the rolling sea. What was she playing at? There must be something. Always was.

She was sitting quietly on the bare aluminum bench, letting him send her ashore into the howling storm.

Had she given up? Stormy Lizzie given up? The Lamia abandoned her snakiness? Or was she still a viper, head to the ground, waiting for him to break? If that was it, she was in for a shock: Jack Sparrow breaks for neither woman nor man.

They had loosed the launch, and Zero cautiously gunned the throttle, picking his way against the surges, rocking back and forth on wide-spread legs as the little boat pitched.

Was she suicidal? She would die on that coast as sure as in the prison, but there had been no repeat of last night, even though most of the crew were still wandering around with guns half-falling out of their pockets, unaware of the menace that dwelt in her gnarled frame—she hadn't even tried…

They were creeping out past the wing. That was neither apathy nor pride in her grim face.

She had put her life utterly in his hands, that was what she was playing at. It wasn't a game at all.

He dropped the vodka—dreadful stuff, but normal vodka was worse—and let the bottle spill over the deck as he sprinted, flailing, for the pantry in the _Tonga_'s tail, stopping only to swipe a plastic bottle of cola from the top of a travel chest and empty it over the floor as he went. He cranked open the little round door in the final bulkhead, ducked inside, and flicked on the electric lantern.

The pantry, like the chain locker, sloped upward into a cone. Its once-bare framework had been hung with shelves and cargo nets, and at the moment, it reeked of acetone, bad eggs, and gasoline from the Tonic. Red pepper coated every horizontal surface. He stifled a sneeze and dragged out a rusty green jerry-can from behind a sack of lentils, spun the cap off—second time today—and filled Jules' empty soda bottle to brimming with brown-tinged water, breathing the old odor of swamp grass and alligator musk that always took him right back to tramping through mud and smacking mosquitoes and burning with life from the waters of the spring trickling over his knees until he felt he could leap up and wrestle the sun out of the sky, even as he watched Ruckman the gunner fall head-first into that six-foot armored maw…

He lurched upright, kicked the jerry-can and lentils back into place, and charged back through the plane, leaping outstretched boots and sneakers, dodging elbows, ignoring Jules' affronted glare, ducking doorway after doorway and finally ripping open the door to the chain-locker after a brief, mindless struggle with the latch.

He scrambled up the slope and popped out of the _Tonga_'s nose hatch into the wind and rain, and clambered out onto the plane's head, slipping on the slick canopy glass. He saw the launch below, cutting away slowly, still heaving and ducking over the waves. "Oy!" he bellowed, then sprinted down the fuselage and onto the starboard wing.

He could drive a truck on that wing. Two trucks.

"Oy!" The wind swept his voice back into his ears, and Zero kept his eyes to shore, dutifully driving Lizzie to her doom. Jack stamped his foot, and the wing boomed.

Zero turned and squinted at him.

"Oy, Zero!" Jack shouted again, waving his arms. He pointed emphatically at Lizzie, then realized there was no way the man could tell what he was pointing at. He cranked his arm back, said a prayer to no one in particular, and flung the bottle as hard as he could at the launch.

It arced through the wind, spinning, for a slow second, for two frantic heart-beats, before it clocked Lizzie on the back of her head and bounced into the bilge.

Jack cringed, then shrugged and minced back to the nose. She had it coming.


	17. Picture This

**Picture This  
**

_You got clouds on your lids, and you'd be on the skids  
If it weren't for your job at the garage._

* * *

_The Present Time. Seriously, it's not a flash-back. Vancouver, Canada._

The tavern door swung open, and Jules watched with narrowed eyes: a tall shivering stick of a boy that he had never seen before, never mind invited, and behind him, the man he had been waiting all day for. The Captain.

Seeing him through the patrons' eyes, Jules regretted putting so much color into his stories.

There was the trench-coat. A big thick swinging canvas thing with stains around the bottom that had probably come from actual trenches, patched, unbuttoned, with wide cuffs and a sheen of linseed oil to keep the rain off: a trench-coat that managed to shed every association with Phillip Marlowe. There was the hat: leather, three corners, completely dingy, for all the man tried to baby it. There was the eyeliner. There was the matted hair that looked like it had been snarled into shape first, and then styled, rather than the other way 'round, and there were the beads, the tin-work, the clinky-things on his belt, the miss-matched rings. There was the drunk-walk. There was the intrusive, authoritative glare, and the fingers flying about like a vaudeville magician's. He looked like a pirate who had wandered into a flea-market and switched all his clothes for modern versions, piece by piece.

Some of the patrons looked at Jules questioningly. He cleared his throat, suddenly nervous as he was at twenty. "Everyone," he announced, "this here's Jack Sparrow." He caught Jack's eye worriedly. "Er, Captain?"

"Always," replied Captain Jack Sparrow. "And me usual."

Jules turned to his shelf of bottles and poured some simple syrup and vodka in a shaker, with a dab of black-strap molasses and a handful of whole allspice, as the Captain straightened himself into his personal approximation of an authoritative stride and marched across the dingy linoleum, squinting and glaring at the assembled crowd.

There was not a regular in sight today.

Jules' usual patrons, the types who drank until they bled Everclear, who came to run far, far away from life itself until they finally died alone and slavering with disease, had been shoved out. The new crowd was a livelier assortment. Most were running from something—creditors, spousal support, FBI, gangs—but certainly not from life.

There was Paul Bunyan, there the young man who probably belonged in college, the short red-haired woman in flannel and overalls, and a whole passel of other people, all between the ages of fifteen and fifty, all with a healthy suspicion in their eyes but without that slick glitter of psychosis that hardened the truly dangerous criminals. This dozen men and women were the makings of a crew.

The young man in the band t-shirt leaned onto the bar once the Captain completed his survey, one hand twitching for Jules' attention. Jules, still sloshing his shaker, took his time and leaned down to his ear.

"Is," hissed the kid, "isn't that the same guy you were telling us—"

"That was in nineteen seventy-one," said Jules. The kid reddened a bit and subsided to his seat.

Jules cut a twist of peel from a rangy little lime, perched it on the rim of a tumbler, and poured in the sweetened spiced amber stuff from the shaker. "Here you go, Captain."

The Captain picked up the tumbler, sniffed it, and wrinkled up his face in disgust. "This isn't me usual," he accused.

"Rum's out," said Jules.

"You keep this dive stocked, d'you not?" the Captain demanded. "How's the rum out?"

Jules turned around and clinked at a bottle on the shelf behind him with a knuckle. "Water," he said. "Had some boys in the mood for coladas the other week; they got the last of it. Sorry, Captain."

The stick boy edged forward, gingerly peeling his cold-reddened fingers out from under his arms. "I'd like a martini," he cut in.

The Captain scowled at the interruption. Jules gave an indulgent smile. "Course, kid. How dry do you like 'em?"

Kyle looked like a dog presented with a soda can. "Eeh, er, uh, normal. Ish."

Jules clumped to the back of the bar, wiped the dust off a martini glass, and upended a dying bottle of gin over it. When the last drops dribbled down, he put the empty bottle back on the shelf and made up the difference with vermouth.

"Here ya go," he said, shoving the glass at Jack's guest, who did not have to be a sophisticated drinker to know the service today was substandard.

Meanwhile, the Captain had dug the Uzi out of his belt, popped the clip onto the bar top, and opened the breech. Jules could see the prospective crew's eyes spring wider as he worked, watched them dart glances back and forth: a dozen pairs flicking, flicking. The Captain, apparently oblivious, shook a tiny something out of his gun and held it up to the light, squinting: perhaps a crumb of porcelain.

The entire bar, with the exception of the kid with his nose in his martini, was staring at him. As usual.

At one of the wall tables, swishing his mouth with a large tumbler of neat whiskey, sat a little pale man with sandy hair, a living warning poster. _Finish high-school,_ advised the livid white burns on his elbows and forearms, his chopped-down index and pinky fingers, and the missing front teeth, _and for the love of all that's holy, don't work with saws and welders for a living._ He spoke up with a throaty, tobacco-torn lisp. "That the gun from the thtory, am I wrong?"

Jules ahemmed into his fist. "Well, you know how it goes with pirate captains," he said. "They get some money, set up a good nest egg, crew's happy, everyone's happy, and then when they retire, they pass their legacy to the bright new kid—"

"Where d'ye get off spouting this drivel, Mr. Weinhardt?" the Captain interrupted as he slapped the gun back together. "There's no call for hand-me-down reputations among the free brethren, savvy? And while I may be bright, I've not been the talented ingénue for many a year. I've seasoned."

Jules sighed and slumped his shoulders. "Sure, Captain. Sorry."

Sparrow gulped down his entire tumbler of doctored vodka and slammed it, empty, to the counter for Jules to shove away with the dirties. "Now tell me about this prospective crew."

Jules leaned out over the bar and pointed to the scarred man who had spoken. "That's Frank," he said. Frank nodded over his whiskey and gave a gap-toothed smile. "He's a mechanic. Little o' this, little o' that."

"Handy with every tool in the shop," put in Frank. "Did thome fabricatin' for a funny-car, little prop plane, tranthmithionth, you name it."

The Captain winced a bit at all the th's, and eyed the way Frank ploughed casually through his liquor. "A gentleman of skills, I see. Who's the lady?"

"Which one?" asked Jules.

"I'm Nelly," volunteered a meaty fortyish brunette in a somber black cotton dress. "I'll take the cookin' and organizin' the pantry, so long as I get to shoot a bit, too. I'm more than a fair shot."

The short-haired red-head coughed firmly.

"Oh, and that's Shirley, there."

Shirley rattled off her qualifications. "Did some auto body work, know my way around a welder, shoot shotgun and pistol. Quiet, low-maintenance, won't cause you no grief."

"Call me Steve," said a balding man who, given a toupee or a hat, seemed to think himself the epitome of 'tall, dark, and handsome.' "I used to be chief assembly coordinator at Boeing's Seattle plant. Left to pursue new opportunities, and _very_ pleased to make your acquaintance."

A roll of Jules' eyes indicated that Steve's departure from Boeing had not been as mutual as he implied.

"I'm DJ," said a handsome Asian with blond spiked hair. "I'm okay with an engine, I guess, but nothing like these guys. Don't know much about guns, either, but…well, it's not exactly calculus, is it?"

"Pretty darn straight-forward," Jules assured him. "Roy?" he said to the lumberjack, who started in his seat.

"Oh, yeah," said Roy. "I did the wilderness delivery deal in Alaska with a little floatplane. Couldn't keep the money together." He shrugged and took an enormous swallow of black ale.

"Roy hunts bears with a Glock," said Jules, indicating with his hands the size of an ordinary handgun.

The Captain's eyebrows jumped. "Certainly mad enough," he said cheerfully. "Who's the stripling?"

Jules nodded at the young man in the AC/DC shirt, who stared shiftily back at him like a mink in a cage. "Kid's Travis. He took a short share; I think he just wants to run, tell the truth. He can shoot."

Travis glared at him when Jules mentioned this last detail.

"And…Captain, who's your guy?" Jules asked, watching Kyle across the room.

Kyle had abandoned his martini and crossed the room to squint at a stuffed armadillo that had been posed to cradle a Corona bottle, his head almost leaning on the shelf it rested on as he peered at its belly. He was wondering how he could get his hands on a dead one; they stuffed so beautifully with their armored skin, like giant pill-bugs, and he longed to take his scalpel and a blunt pin to its innards to see how it was put together.

The Captain grimaced. "Oh, him. He's no one." He counted on his fingers, stared up at the ceiling, and ran his eyes over the assembled drinkers. Three skilled mechanics, a pilot, a chef, and two swabs. "Tell me, Mr. Weinhardt," he said, leaning across the bar until Jules backed up a pace, "why I failed to hear the words 'flight engineer' thus far."

Jules hissed in breath, shut his eyes, and steeled himself. "Captain, if we could take this to the storeroom."

* * *

Oh, yeah, I dig what Kyle's talkin' about. Sure would love to scoop me up one of those armadillos off the side of the road and stick it in a cooler for an afternoon of exploratory dissection.


	18. Shine On, You Crazy Diamond

**Shine On, You Crazy Diamond**

_We'll bask in the shadow of yesterday's triumph, and sail on the steel breeze…_

* * *

Sparrow patted his Uzi, glared at Jules, and glanced back at the rest of the bar, who were all watching him. _Stay_, he mouthed, smoothing the air vigorously with his hands, and followed the ex-pirate down a little hall, past a worrying bathroom and a tiny living area graced by a worn-out cot and a television, and into the Hole's bare pantry.

He spun round in disappointment, taking in smashed cardboard boxes, depleted crates, bits of glass, and a solitary bottle of Frangelico gathering cobwebs on the floor.

"Bit of a fix you've allowed," remarked Jack. "Suppose somebody comes in here for a drink."

"Yeah, that's…uh," said Jules. He shut his weary eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand, holding his place in the air with the other, then tipped his head up and blurted, "Captain, I'm your new flight engineer."

Sparrow blinked and cocked his head, curled his lip in disdain, glanced down at Jules' bad leg and began a dismissive flutter of one fine hand—the classic signs of devastating verbal ninjitsu in the offing. Jules babbled to head him off.

"It's not like I haven't looked—I did," he insisted, "but there just aren't many guys around who can run that thing that aren't getting veteran's paychecks in Florida. The young guys all work for the forest service on _Philippine_ and _Hawaii_. They're not crooks. There's just me left and the old crew, and if you don't want to call one of them up and explain why you're exactly the same as the day they, er, quit on you, I'm the only one around who'll do for the job. Sir."

"Mr. Weinhardt, you make it seem I've no choice in the matter," said Sparrow, dangerously derisive. "Fact remains, there's men trained to similar birds in all the former colonies, and f'give my saying so, but you've grown a bit bald and toothy of late. I've no room for a Hopkins on my ship," Sparrow finished, pointing at Jules' bad leg.

"Well, that's not my problem, is it?" Jules demanded. "I found your guys. They're good, they're willing, the best you can get in this business, just like me. And if you recall, you said as soon as you got the _Tonga_ back you'd come right back for all the crew that stuck by you—"

"I didn't say tha—"

"Yes, you did. Been thirty years, Cap, but that's not the kind of day you forget."

Sparrow fluttered his hands, sidled from side to side, and lifted a finger to speak, but Jules, staring at his own shoes, beat him to it, with a sudden hoarse whisper. "I gotta tell you right now, I've had enough of drowning here. And you can give me another shot."

If Sparrow were a cat, he would have bristled up to twice his normal size, hissing and flattening his ears. As he was, he lifted his head and shoulders a full inch and closed on Jules, his mouth twitching dangerously from his clenched teeth. "Mr. Weinhardt," he growled, "we've had this talk once. And I do recall that talk was not to be repeated, mulled over, dwelt upon, or, save for the barest convenient bits, remembered at all on your part—terms with which you have broken faith most blatantly. I'm immortal. You're not. _Finis_."

Jules slouched down, cowered, even, and seated himself mildly on an old rum crate that hadn't been smashed. "Cap," he insisted, forcing himself to leave off staring at the floor and look Captain Sparrow in his unsettling eyes, "I remember the old lady, what you did for her."

The Captain twitched as though he had elbowed an electric fence. "What old lady?" he demanded, looking at the wall.

Jules rubbed his hands over his face and rolled his eyes behind them. "I saw her, Cap," he said.

Sparrow slumped sourly. "Oh."

* * *

_1971, just before dawn, a secluded inlet outside Vladivostok, USSR.  
_

Jules wriggled in his hammock, sweat itching on his scalp, the cuts in his shin burning and thrumming like a wasp nest. The air in the hold was humid and foul with breathing. Someone farted. With a huff, Jules rolled to his feet, and staggered when his bad foot took his weight.

He kept a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in his trunk, next to his coat and his clean pants, his souvenirs, his petty cash, and his handgun. He'd never been one for actually breathing in—it made him cough and look like a fool—but sometimes a man just had to pop off for a smoking break.

Like now.

He limped through the center of the room, flicking the lighter so the little yellow flame lit his way to the forward doorway. As he put a hand to the crank and slowly eased the latch open, he paused and glanced down at the wounded, asleep on pads on the hard floor. Maxine, no longer frozen in pain, had rolled onto her back, one hand over her head and the other loose over her bandaged stomach. Mitty's foot twitched.

He whispered a long-neglected "thank-you, God," padded to the half-shut hatch-way, and pushed through, drawing a subdued squeak of hinges before he stepped over the lip at the threshold and into the dark empty room below the cockpit, eyes on the mud-smeared sheet steel floor, lighter and cigarette lighting his way.

An icy grip at his mouth and the bite of steel at his throat shocked him to a stop. He sucked for air, flailed, gouged his neck against a thin blade, staggered and dropped the fire and ember, and might have brought himself bleeding to the floor if not his attacker, but for a low, stern voice in his ear.

"Stop struggling," said the woman.

Jules lowered his arms and straightened stiffly, hissing his breath. The lighter still burned by a miracle, and he watched the shadows of the wall-struts dance as he slowly lifted his hands above his shoulders. Looking down, he saw a ragged tan pant leg braced behind his own, a long bird-like shin rough with goose-bumps, even more dirty tan fabric, and a scrawny arm. He slowly twisted his head back.

She was young and wasted-thin, her porcelain skin stretched over proud, elegant bones, her lips pressed from the cold, her tense throat showing every shiver, every pulse, every twitch of cords, her large eyes fixed, determined…exhilarated. Her pale hair was short and ragged, puffing out comically around her head like the down of a gosling, and her eyes halved her face: one a keen deep brown, the other, squinting and watering, a pale Siberian blue. Jules gaped: she seemed surreal, a willow naiad stopping his mouth and pressing a box-cutter to his throat.

She grabbed him by one ear and tugged his head sharply forward. "Be absolutely silent," she murmured, "and you might live to forget all this."

* * *

_The Present Time. Vancouver, Canada._

"I didn't put it together until, oh, around eighty-two," Jules recalled. "This guy I worked with had a dog, nice dog, just one day popped out a ton of puppies. And they all had blue eyes, for the first week or so. But then they started turning colors, 'till they were all normal brown-eyed mutts." He stared at Sparrow, searching for a sign, appreciation, alarm, anything.

"So that's how you lost your pistol and your share," said the Captain with a grin.

Jules sighed. "She marched me through the common room, had me empty my trunk, marched me back, and poured vodka on my shirt. Then she must've clubbed me with the gun and rowed back the way she came."

"Ah, yes. You had to scrub the head for that episode, so I recall. Drunk and delinquent, and not a word of protest out of you."

"Who'd believe me?" asked Jules. He blinked, dropped his jaw, and hurried on, rushing his words. "No one, that's who. No one I know of, and even if I found out, no one you haven't handled already. I already _know_. I've known for years. I can be your other pair of eyes on the _Tonga_, I can handle maintenance, keep her ready and running, show the other guys what's going on where. Nobody's gonna come looking for me, not even the loan sharks or the insurance company. I got no family anymore. My customers are too wasted to say the word 'beer,' all they do is grunt for it, they're not gonna go filing any missing person's reports. I disappear, I'm gone for good."

Sparrow listened with irritation, amusement, concern, and finally some contorted hybrid of amused, exasperated horror. His fingers twitched over his Uzi. "You're lucky I've no love of precipitous action," he said at length.

Jules gripped his hands together. "I'll crew if you give me what you gave her."

The Uzi snaked out and dug into his chin, Sparrow an instant behind it with a hand at Jules' neck and his glittering black eyes knifing into him. "However," he said, with a taught smile that bared far too many teeth, "you do tempt me. And as you so kindly explained, you'd never be missed."

Jules nodded once, weak-kneed, but not shocked. He shut his eyes. "Do you want a flight engineer or not?"

Sparrow tilted his head back and forth, looking Jules up and down and shifting on his feet. "Suppose I did," he said lightly, packing the Uzi away. "You sign the articles. I get what I want, you get back to the jolly life, hard boozing and sleeping with flies in your mouth and picking your friends' arms up off the ground after they've stood at the wrong end of a bazooka, aye?"

Jules paled, but nodded again.

"Ye certain?" the Captain demanded, closing the distance even further.

"Yeah," breathed Jules. "Yeah, yes, yes, Captain. Just—"

Sparrow cut him off. "Before dawn, be at Clowhon Lake, western shore. Shave your head and change your clothes."

Jules blinked, bugged his eyes out, and staggered to a seat, jaw slack. "You—you're doing it? Really?"

Sparrow grinned down at him. "Call it a generous mood. One time only, and you'll be the last, so make good of those extra years."

"But won't you need it—whatever it is?" Jules asked, dazed. It never hurt to be suspicious of Captain Sparrow, however much it hurt to interrogate him.

"I'm immortal," said the Captain with a flip of his hand. "But don't go asking me for more. One shot, and this is your one solitary chance at resurrection, laddie. There's to be no Tonic this trip."

"How about a doctor?" asked Jules, concerned.

"Brought one!" exclaimed Sparrow hastily. Then his grin slipped and he spun around to face the wall between them and the bar, muttering something like "Oh, did not mean to say that."

"The kid?"

Sparrow bobbed his head and arms and smiled falsely. "Aye, him. So we've a doctor, we've your good self, and we've a skeleton crew of deluded grease-monkeys. We weigh anchor on the morrow."

Jules nodded, and the Captain spun on his heel, tugged the light chain as he passed, and left Jules, slumped and dazed, alone in the dark. Jules had the impression that Sparrow had not been entirely truthful with him, but that was nothing odd. He smiled too wide, buried his head in his hands, and listened to the cockroaches skitter across the boards.

* * *

Sparrow's address to the rest of the prospective crew began with the promise of outrageous fortune, free-flowing spirits, and gorgeous strippers, moved on to the ship's articles, and closed with the 'shopping list' and a few words of advice on breaking open security grates, hotwiring cars, and discretely maneuvering large packages.

That night saw a spurt of synchronized robbery the likes of which Vancouver had never before known: machine shops, hardware stores, grocery stores, pawn shops, liquor stores, and, a first in the _Tonga_'s experience, Safeway's collection of feminine protection products. Kyle Warner had found himself a 100-pack of straight razor blades and several bags of extra-large wire-ties, which he stuffed in his pockets.

In the morning, a fleet of heavily laden old pickup trucks converged on the pine woods that shrouded remote Clowhon Lake, meeting two stolen tanker trucks, Captain Sparrow, and a pasty shaved-headed young man he introduced as Judas Hector Cliengmuler, Jules the Bartender's illegitimate son from Wichita.

With the welding equipment stowed, the pantry stocked, the hammocks rigged, and sleeping quarters for the women sorted out in the cramped upper deck, _Tonga Mars_ was finally ready to hunt.

* * *

The cockpit reared high over the water, a shiny tin-can ceiling giving way to the bright stuffy canopy of glass and struts. With a sigh, Jack Sparrow slipped around the throttle block and sank into the pilot's seat, watching a brisk head-wind gather in the treetops, pressing a hand to the window and imagining the breeze outside. He fingered a filigreed snuff-box on his belt, and toasted from a stolen bottle of whiskey.

Inside the snuff-box, tightly sealed in layers of plastic, were strips and strips of old negatives. Side views, bird's eye views, front and back and interior views, a portrait of a figurehead, the view of high spars seen from the quarterdeck, and broad, detailed sheets of plans drawn from memory. The _Pearl_ was in that box. The only ship he would ever call_ his_.

Maybe he shouldn't do that, he thought. The _Pearl_ had been a ship, but she was more than a ship, having a face and a memory and a heart that throbbed to the beat of the waves, and one couldn't exactly own a person, now could one? No one could own Jack Sparrow, for which he was glad, but he couldn't own anybody else—not even borrow them—but then they could still give themselves to other people, though even that certainly wasn't final or definite by any means . . . which made everything so devilishly complicated. Perhaps he should stick to ships.

He gazed at the clouds, spotting a trireme tilting full-speed at the letter H on the port horizon, let fly the engines until they stopped coughing and settled into a lung-shaking hum, then, when _Tonga Mars_ slashed faster and faster across the water into the west, broke them from the lake to cross the great Pacific and stalk the East Indies once again.

* * *

Don't go anywhere without your wire-ties and your trusty 100-pack of straight razors! It's amazing how fast those things dull once they get a little blood on them...

And, yeah, Jack is still feeding Jules a load of bull.

Stay tuned for the epilogue, unless you ship Sparrabeth, in which case you should stop reading now.


	19. I've Been Workin' On The Railroad

**I've Been Workin' on the Railroad  
**

_Just to pass the time away...  
_

* * *

_1973, Eastern bank of the Mississippi, Saint Louis, Missouri.  
_

A great mar in the earth, a sandy pit, a gouge framed by concrete and the river's edge, a well to cradle the _Pearl_ ten times over, ringed by hulking crawlers with churning abdomens, clawed cranes, derricks and pulleys, cable swinging and swaying, the clang and clatter of hydraulics and hammers and falls, and everywhere steel, beams and spars to crush giants, rubber, scurrying men, and the belch of diesel.

At the sidewalk beyond the high chain-link fence that bordered the site of the new bridge, a white cab let out a lean young woman in a man's pea-coat, who thrust a bill at the driver and waved him away. She stalked distractedly around the perimeter, her throat tense, her short wavy hair stinging her eyes in the wind. The sun was dipping, the sky fading from red to gold to blue-green.

Spars and stays stretched overhead, dizzying. She shaded her eyes and peered up, scanning the workers' faces, watching for who they looked to as they hurried about securing beams and guiding their machinery, inscrutable as bees on a comb. Where was he? Which was he?

And his voice burst down upon her ears, fuzzed, rebounding, but still those same calm earnest tones that comforted and infuriated her by turns. "Live steel overhead," he said simply, and a frail cable spooled upward toward a gossamer crane boom, hooking a neat, swinging bundle of fifty-foot beams.

She looked up for the man with the megaphone. There, at the top of a piling frame. Nothing familiar about him, not from this angle or distance—but no, there was the steady stance, the swift, single-minded economy of movement. Casually, he strolled the unrailed edge of a scaffold.

She sucked in breath and bellowed, the shout of a commander in a storm. "Will!"

He looked down, but did not see her, and she shrieked, ripping her throat, "Will!"

This time, he turned in her direction and shaded his eyes.

She flung herself at the chain-link barrier, ignoring the shouts of the workmen as she flew to the wildly dipping crest of the flimsy fence. She leapt down and thudded to all fours, losing her slippers to the clay sand. Barefoot, she sprinted for the foot of the scaffold, her flying elbows and a desperate snarl warding off the startled young bucks in their hard hats: no one would stop her, and if anyone tried, he would find himself missing an eye.

There was a hiss and a clump, a hiss and a clump from above: Will had gripped a corner pole in his thick gloves and was dropping by stages down the outside of the scaffold, slipping by his hands and booming down to the platform below him: plywood rippled, bolts shrieked, tools rattled and wobbled on their perches and the men dropped their tasks in shock as their foreman rattled past them on the edge of death.

At the last ledge, he jumped to the ground, inches before she slammed into him, clutching at his coat, gasping.

With shaking hands, he pulled her chin up to the light as she began to sob. Slowly, firmly, he gripped her back, pulling her close until his face sank to the nape of her neck, and she felt tears.

They stood for a long while on the broken ground, as her feet grew numb against the toes of his boots and his shoulders began to ache. Neither cared to break their hold. "I mourned you," he whispered.

Elizabeth blinked wetly, her face still buried in the coarse canvas of Will's work jacket. "You knew?" she murmured, voice breaking. "You didn't come for me?"

"I was angry," he admitted.

She lifted her face suddenly, mouthing "oh," and she nodded to herself, little more than a tremor.

"It was your choice," he breathed. "But then you were dead—"

He broke off and hugged her again.

She smiled through her tears and shook. "You're still here."

He nodded against her head.

"You frightened me so," she breathed. "I thought…if you heard I died…"

He hugged her again, shuddered, pressed his face into her hair, but when he spoke, he smiled. "You always were a vain woman, Elizabeth."

She laughed, her voice still choked with sobbing. This was why she'd come back, why she'd fought for him those centuries ago—for what was waiting but a solemn private war?—and now she leaned back to look him in the eyes. "Forever?"

He frowned over her shoulder, then looked down at her pleading face, and melted. "For—for a very long time," he whispered. "But let's not do that again."

"I'm sorry," she began, lowering her eyes, but he brushed a hand to her chin and smiled the truest smile he had in forty years. They kissed slow and long in the whirring shadows of booms and cranes and cables, careless of the hundred eyes around them.

* * *

Aw, sweet.

Twu Wuv, mawwidge, and the lot.

Oh, and for curiosity's sake: here's the articles of _Tonga Mars_. A hybrid of two genuine sets of pirate articles, with modern conveniences.

1. The Captain is to have two full Shares, the Master is to have one Share and one Half; the Doctor, Mechanics, and Flight Engineer one Share and one Quarter.

2. That Man or Woman of this Company that shall offer to run away, or deliver up any Secret of the Company, shall be maroon'd with one Bottle of Water, one small Arm, and Cartridges, in some Location agreed to by the Company.

3. If any Thing of value be found on Board of any Prize or Prizes to the value of Fifty Dollars American, and the finder do not deliver it to the Captain in the space of 24 hours, that Man or Woman shall suffer what Punishment the Captain and the Company shall think fit.

4. That Man or Woman that shall steal any Thing in the Company, to the value of Fifty Dollars American, shall suffer what Punishment the Captain and the Company shall think fit.

5. Disputes to be settled Ashore, each combatant armed with Knife and small Arm with one Shot, in the presence of the Company.

6. That Man or Woman that shall flick his or her Lighter, or smoke Tobacco in the Hose Room or Magazine, shall surrender his or her Lighter and Tobacco, for so long as the Captain and the Company shall think fit, in addition to what other Punishment the Captain and the Company shall think fit.

7. That Man or Woman that shall fail to present himself or herself fitly Armed, or neglect his or her Business, or be found Guilty of Cowardice or Drunkenness in time of Engagement, shall be cut off from his or her Share, and suffer such other Punishment as the Captain and the Company shall think fit.

8. If any Man or Woman shall lose a Joint in time of an Engagement, he or she shall have 4000 Dollars American, if a Limb, 8000.

9. If at any time you meet with a prudent Woman or reticent Man, that Man or Woman that offers to meddle with her or him, without her or his Consent, shall suffer present Death.

10. No Man or Woman of the Company shall burden the Ship with more than Three times his or her body's Weight in Cargo.

11. The Ship's Battery Power shall be prudently preserved except in times of hazard to Ship and Life.

12. The Map Room shall be reserved for the Captain's use.


End file.
